''Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.''
''Nothing puzzles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.''
''The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.''
''In everything that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.''
''Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.''
''I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.''
''The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth.''
''Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see another mountain in my life.''
''"Presents," I often say, "endear absents."''
''Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.''
''The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.''
''A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.''
''But cards are war, in disguise of a sport.''
''He has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality.''
''Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.''
''The greatest pleasure I know, is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.''
''The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.''
''Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.''
''Borrowers of books—those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.''
''A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity.... He is known by his knock.''
''Not many sounds in life ... exceed in interest a knock at the door.''
