When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.