Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments of agitation and revolution, during which the bosom of a family is the most unrestful and disturbing place in existence.

every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it.

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Terror of being found out is not always a preservative, it sometimes hurries on the act which it ought to prevent.

As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.

The ideal is the flower-garden of the mind, and very apt to run to weeds unless carefully tended.

Laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears.