The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight -- this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one -- this is business.

If you must be indiscrete, be discrete in your indiscretion.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.