We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

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.

Wine is bottled poetry.

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected.