Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

I do not think myself to be a worm, and a grub, grass of the field fit only to be burned, a clod, a morsel of putrid atoms that should be thrown to the dungheap, ready for the nethermost pit. Nor if I did should I therefore expect to sit with Angels and Archangels.

I think the greatest rogues are they who talk most of their honesty.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

Oxford is the most dangerous place to which a young man can be sent.