Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food, and few things in the world are more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards life.

The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.

Necessity knows no Sunday.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

When the contemplative mind is a French mind, it is content, for the most part, to contemplate France. When the contemplative mind is an English mind, it is liable to be seized at any moment by an importunate desire to contemplate Morocco or Labrador.

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.

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