Even the clearest and most perfect circumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman; if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say that she did it with her teeth.

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.

It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.

Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill-natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter and then break furniture over him.