All we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you and what people think of you.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.

[At the end of the story, its main character, Tom] is now a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things that no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues.

The loveliest fairy in the world; and her name is Mrs Do as you would bed one by.

I go at what I have to do as if there were nothing else in the world for me to do.