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

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.

History is not written in the interests of morality.

Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.

In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.

A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.

Innovations to which we are not committed are illuminating things.