The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economized by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

A severe though not unfriendly critic of our institutions said that the cure for admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

A slight daily unconscious luxury is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilization; like the gentle air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment.

Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.