Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.