Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

Bargaining is essential to the life of the world; but nobody has ever claimed that it is an ennobling process.

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

Letters form a by-path of literature, a charming, but occasional, retreat for people of cultivated leisure.