There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule.

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.

We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.

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.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.