“Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.”

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil?

The concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women’s voices?

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

If a cook can’t make soup between two and seven, she can’t make it in a week.

Audacity in wooing is a great virtue, but a man must measure even his virtues.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.

My sweetheart is to me more than a coined hemisphere.

For there is no folly so great as keeping one’s sorrows hidden.

No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife?

But the school in which good training is most practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars.

I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth and all that kind of thing. . .

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

Democracy is perhaps the most promiscuous word in the world of public affairs.

Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.

It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.

A dishonor greater than any affair, is that of a friend who never was.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

It was only one life. What is one life in the affairs of a state?

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.