The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.

I do not admire politicians; but when they are excellent in their way, one cannot help allowing them their due.

I never found even in my juvenile hours that it was necessary to go a thousand miles in search of themes for moralizing.

Serendipity... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.

Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.

He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.