The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.

A bad memory is the mother of invention.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

Everyone alters and is altered by everyone else. We are all the time taking in portions of one another or else reacting against them, and by these involuntary acquisitions and repulsions modifying our natures.