I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.

Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.

The physician...is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization.