Our domestic Napoleons, too many of them, give flattery, bonnets and bracelets to women, and everything else but - justice.

I hate the word proper. If you tell me a thing is not proper, I immediately feel the most rabid desire to go 'neck and heels' into it.

When a literary person's exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to talk books.

Every father knows at once too much and too little about his own son.

Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendor so sharply present itself.

Why don't men ... leave off those detestable stiff collars, stocks, and things, that make them all look like choked chickens, and which hide so many handsomely-turned throats, that a body never sees, unless a body is married, or unless a body happens to see a body's brothers while they are shaving.

There are no little things. "Little things," so called, are the hinges of the universe.