Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.

The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.