Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another with sympathy and enjoyment, a field for the finest amenities of civilization, for the keenest and most intelligent display of social activity. It is also our solace, our inspiration, and our most rational pleasure. It is a duty we owe to one another; it is our common debt to humanity.

It is not the office of a novelist to show us how to behave ourselves; it is not the business of fiction to teach us anything.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.

whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

It has been well said that tea is suggestive of a thousand wants, from which spring the decencies and luxuries of civilization.

But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, has an ugly trick of collapsing when full blown, and facts are stony things that refuse to melt away in the sunshine of a smile.