No furniture is so charming as books.

The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.

Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Lucy, dear child, mind your arithmetic. You know in the first sum of yours I ever saw there was a mistake. You had carried two (as a cab is licensed to do), and you ought, dear Lucy, to have carried but one. Is this a trifle? What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors.

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.