nothing in life is more corroding than habit.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the 'ancestral piles' of England.

The only two good words that can be said for a hurricane are that it gives sufficient warning of its approach, and that it blows from one point of the compass at a time.

Has it ever occurred to you, that the rich are at the mercy of the poor, not the poor at that of the rich? Who permits us to be rich if not the poor?

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

fiction is not only the historian of life but its apologist.