The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.