Wine is valued for its price, not its flavor.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,--cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

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.

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.

It is the highest and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters M.P. written after his name. No selection from the alphabet, no doctorship, no fellowship, be it of ever so learned or royal a society, no knightship,--not though it be of the Garter,--confers so fair an honour.