Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.