Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

Human passions against eternal laws -- that is the everlasting conflict.

Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep, and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

Nothing, perhaps, is strange, once you have accepted life itself, the great strange business which includes all lesser strangeness.

Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.