The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Brothers are so unpleasant.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.