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

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

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

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

[Mary Wortley Montagu] wrote more letters, with fewer punctuation marks, than any Englishwoman of her day; and her nephew, the fourth Baron Rokeby, nearly blinded himself in deciphering the two volumes of undated correspondence which were printed in 1810. Two more followed in 1813, after which the gallant Baron either died at his post or was smitten with despair; for sixty-eight cases of letters lay undisturbed ... 'Les morts n'écrivent point,' said Madame de Maintenon hopefully; but of what benefit is this inactivity, when we still continue to receive their letters?

The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.