The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.

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

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

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.

The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.

real letter-writing ... is founded on a need as old and as young as humanity itself, the need that one human being has of another.

There is no illusion so permanent as that which enables us to look backward with complacency; there is no mental process so deceptive as the comparing of recollections with realities.