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

The earliest voice listened to by the nations in their infancy was the voice of the storyteller.

It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.

A kitten is chiefly remarkable for rushing about like mad at nothing whatever and generally stopping before it gets there.

Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.