Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue.

You want to hate somebody, if you can, just to keep your powers of discrimination bright, and to save yourself from becoming a mere mush of good-nature.

What small potatoes we all are, compared with what we might be!

A cynic might suggest as the motto of modern life this simple legend-"just as good as the real.

If there was any petting to be done...he chose to do it. Often he would sit looking at me, and then, moved by a delicate affection, come and pull at my coat and sleeve until he could touch my face with his nose, and then go away contented.

Snobbery, being an aspiring failing, is sometimes the prophecy of better things.

There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.