“Never complain and never explain.”

When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire from the world.

No Government can be long secure without a formidable Opposition.

Damn your principles! Stick to your party.

The difference between a misfortune and a calamity is this: If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone dragged him out again, that would be a calamity.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords.

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

Little things affect little minds.

Without tact you can learn nothing.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends.

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Plagiarists, at least, have the merit of preservation.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

We must be careful not to choose, but to let God’s Holy Spirit manage our lives; not to smooth down and explain away.

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.