If anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle

I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

He had the appeal of a very young dog of a very large breed -- a kind of amiable absurdity.

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.

there is undoubtedly something irritating about the favorites of fortune.

We shall know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.