"If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence."

"The history of art is the history of revivals."

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

"Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both."

"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."

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

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

"Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name."

"Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it."

"We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them."

"Oaths are but words, and words are but wind."

"Friendship is like money, easier made than kept."

"Be virtuous and you will be vicious."

"Neither irony or sarcasm is argument."

"The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money."

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

"Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint."

"Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine."

"Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions."

"All truth is not to be told at all times."

"There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth."

"Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance."

"A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy."

"Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness."

"It is tact that is golden, not silence."

"A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war."

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

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

"One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once."

"If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death."

"It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out."

"In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation."

"Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature."

"To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all."

"Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost."

"People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced."

"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."

"We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms."

"And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods."

"An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books."

"Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man."

"You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it."

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

"The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore."

"We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself."

"Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing."

"Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them."

"To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it."

"Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?"

"God cannot alter the past, though historians can."