Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!

When people bury treasure nowadays they do it in the Post-Office bank.

My uncle, Mr. Stephen Maple, had been at the same time the most successful and the least respectable of our family, so that we hardly knew whether to take credit for his wealth or to feel ashamed of his position.

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

Yet birth, and lust, and illness, and death are changeless things, and when one of these harsh facts springs out upon a man at some sudden turn of the path of life, it dashes off for the moment his mask of civilization and gives a glimpse of the stranger and stronger face below.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity, it is certainly beyond me.