None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try.

But we are all insane, anyway ... The suicides seem to be the only sane people.

I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it.

Anybody can have ideas-the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag.

Wherein lies a poet's claim to originality? That he invents his incidents? No. That he was present when his episodes had their birth? No. That he was first to repeat them? No. None of these things has any value. He confers on them their only originality that has any value, and that is his way of telling them.

The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic.