“The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.”

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Trouble’s made us kin.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.

I have nothing to tell except travellers’ stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

It’s never too late to be who you were meant to be.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.