"After all," as a pretty girl once said to me, "women are a sex by themselves, so to speak."

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people.

Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.

The critic who justly admires all kinds of things simultaneously cannot love any one of them.

Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

A hundred eyes were fixed on her, and half as many hearts lost to her.

It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter.