Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.

Travel ennobles the spirit and does away with our prejudices.

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

Even things that are true can be proved.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.