When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

Style is a magic wand, and turns everything to gold that it touches.

Uncultivated minds are not full of wild flowers, like uncultivated fields. Villainous weeds grow in them and they are the haunt of toads.

If they lost the incredible conviction that they can change their wives or husbands, marriage would collapse at once.

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.