“There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.”

Guests are the delight of leisure, and the solace of ennui.

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

A dead grief is easier to bear than a live trouble.

Traveling is, and has always been, more popular than the traveler.

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?

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.

Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.

The man who never tells an unpalatable truth ‘at the wrong time’ (the right time has yet to be discovered) is the man whose success in life is fairly well assured.

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture.

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.

It is impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind, as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.

English civilization rests largely upon tea and cricket, with mighty spurts of enjoyment on Derby Day, and at Newmarket.

It is unwise to feel too much if we think too little.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.