“There is a vast deal of make-believe in the carefully nurtured sentiment for country life, and the barefoot boy, and the mountain girl.”

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge … falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.

Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.

The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.

It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.

Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.

Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.

We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.

But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.

We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.

I’m barefoot whenever I can be.

You know you’re old when someone compliments you on your alligator shoes, and you’re barefoot.