“Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.”

Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.

The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round.

Wit is a thing capable of proof.

It is not begging but the beggar, who has forfeited favor with the elect.

Too much rigidity on the part of teachers should be followed by a brisk spirit of insubordination on the part of the taught.

Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.

Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer’s reputation.

Art… does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.

It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.

It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

Next to the joy of the egotist is the joy of the detractor.

the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring – or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps – lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.