Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.