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.

Wit is a thing capable of proof.

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

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.

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

By providing cheap and wholesome reading for the young, we have partly succeeded in driving from the field that which was positively bad; yet nothing is easier than to overdo a reformation, and, through the characteristic indulgence of American parents, children are drugged with a literature whose chief merit is its harmlessness.

Humor hardens the heart, at least to the point of sanity.