Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.

Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?

People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.

What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts. . . . But you, I think, have always comprehended this.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.