“What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one’s memories.”

We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

Men seek but one thing in life — their pleasure.

I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation.

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

There are two good things in life – freedom of thought and freedom of action.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

It is bad enough to know the past; it would be intolerable to know the future.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

If a man hasn’t what’s necessary to make a woman love him, it’s his fault, not hers.

If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts.

The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.

if you’d ever had a grown-up daughter you’d know that by comparison a bucking steer is easy to manage. And as to knowing what goes on inside her – well, it’s much better to pretend you’re the simple, innocent old fool she almost certainly takes you for.

They call beautiful a dress, a dog, a sermon; and when they are face to face with Beauty cannot recognise it.

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.

It’s no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement.

Some of our philosophizing divines have too much exalted the faculties of our souls, when they have maintained that by their force mankind has been able to find out God.

Realisation is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.

What is imagination? It is a God-like, a noble faculty. It renders earth tolerable, it teaches us to live, in the tone of the eternal.

Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!