there are some people who never acknowledge themselves in the wrong; God help them!

. . .the most astonishing, the most surprising, the most marvelous, the most miraculous. . . the greatest, the least, the rarest, the most common, the most public, the most private till today. . . I cannot bring myself to tell you: guess what it is.

. . . this life is a perpetual chequer-work of good and evil, pleasure and pain. When in possession of what we desire, we are only so much the nearer losing it; and when at a distance from it, we live in expectation of enjoying it again.

Why do we discover faults so much more readily than perfection.

I do not like to employ secretaries that have more wit than myself. I am afraid to make them write all my nonsense.

The human heart will never wrinkle

It is day by day that we go forward; today we are as we were yesterday and tomorrow we shall be like ourselves today. So we go on without being aware of it, and this is one of the miracles of Providence that I so love.