“Who that has plodded on to middle age would take back upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, with their mingled pleasures and pains? Who would return to the youth he is forever pretending to regret?”

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

We owe to one another all the wit and good humour we can command; and nothing so clears our mental vistas as sympathetic and intelligent conversation.

We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.

But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.

We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.

Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

it is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing.

Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies.

There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as a thorough-going monomania.

To be brave in misfortune is to be worthy of manhood; to be wise in misfortune is to conquer fate.

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join

People fed on sugared praises cannot be expected to feel an appetite for the black broth of honest criticism.

Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

A vast deal of ingenuity is wasted every year in evoking the undesirable, in the careful construction of objects which burden life. Frankenstein was a large rather than an isolated example.

Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept.