''Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.''
''To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.''
''There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.''
''Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.''
''Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords.''
''Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.''
''Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.''
''Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by neglect of many other things.''
''A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.''
''The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.''
''Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.''
''Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.''
''I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.''
''Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good.''
''All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.''
''Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.''
''Pieces of eight! pieces of eight! pieces of eight!''
''To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.''
''It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.''
''You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.''
''Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.''
''When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.''
''If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.''
''To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.''
''In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.''
''For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!''
''I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.''
''Everyone lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.''
''So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.''
''You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.''
''The obscurest epoch is to-day.''
''There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.''
''The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.''
''Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.''
''He sows hurry and reaps indigestion.''
