“The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.”

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

When once a woman is married she should be regarded as having thrown off her allegiance to her own sex. She is sure to be treacherous at any rate in one direction.

He should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.

What is there that money will not do?

People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

I judge a man by his actions with men, much more than by his declarations Godwards.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

Of Dickens’ style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules…

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.

Of all hatreds that the world produces, a wife’s hatred for her husband, when she does hate him, is the strongest.

Let a man be of what side he may in politics, unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil?