With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Don't judge a book by its cover

A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.

Beautiful food and health are priceless.

Use your little grey cells mon ami" (Hercule Poirot in 'The Mysterious Affair At Styles')

Why yes, I can, ' said Midas Mulligan, when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. 'The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.

It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment.

Wild women don't get the blues.

We are sent into the world, like Jesus, to serve. For this is the natural expression of our love for our neighbors. We love. We go. We serve.

I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

There is nothing we should be quite so grateful for as the last line of the poem that goes, 'When your own heart asks.