It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

Wit is a thing capable of proof.

The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.

Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home.

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.

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.