Nature was beautiful, even in her tears - Jerome K. Jerome

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before.