Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.