When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.