Intellectual ''work'' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.

The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.