A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

A simple life is its own reward.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.