Michael Robertson

“He had not a handsome face, but it was better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“He used to say that there were only two sources of human vice: idleness and superstition; and that there were only two virtues: activity and intelligence.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.”
― Charles Dickens

“But at once, as happens with so-called characterless people, he desired so passionately to experience again that dissolute life so familiar to him, that he decided to go. And at once the thought occurred to him that the word he had given meant nothing, because before giving his word to Prince Andrei, he had also given Prince Anatole his word that he would be there; finally he thought that all these words of honor were mere conventions, with no definite meaning, especially if you considered that you might die the next day, or something so extraordinary might happen to you that there would no longer be either honor or dishonor. That sort of reasoning often came to Pierre, destroying all his decisions and suppositions”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace