I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.

Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.

Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.

The course of true anything never does run smooth.

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.