It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only es

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.