“Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.”

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself.

I love everything that’s old, – old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.

With disadvantages enough to bring him to humility, a Scotsman is one of the proudest things alive.

The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.

Modesty seldom resides in a breast that is not enriched with nobler virtues.

If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, ‘Twas only when he was off, he was acting.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowded with fruition.

They say women and music should never be dated.

Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook.

A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.

I chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, for qualities that would wear well.

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us.

A honest man is seldom a vagrant.

Besides, switchboard girls and secretaries have become very good. They’ve learned to take you apart. ‘Who? Why? What for? What company?’ You don’t always get by. I seldom call on the phone. I’d rather go.

Whether this happens because they stay so long and attend their work so diligently that they forget the faces and persons, which they first sat down with, or whatever it is, they seldom rise from the toilet the same woman they appeared when they began to dress

The minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

Books are not seldom talismans and spells.

The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow.

We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.