You youngsters nowadays think you're to begin with living well and working easy; you've no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.