Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection-that is the last and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.

It is impossible that a genius - at least a literary genius - can ever be discovered by his intimates; they are so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't get at his proportions; they can't perceive that there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.