This world belongs to the energetic.

The law of the table is beauty, a respect to the common soul of the guests. Everything is unreasonable which is private to two or three, or any portion of the company. Tact never violates for a moment this law; never intrudes the orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we say, we never “talk shop” before company. Lovers abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, while they sit in one parlor with common friends.

Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared "that the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow".

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.

The imagination is not a talent of some men but is the health of every man.

Music is the poor man's Parnassus.

Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Never read any book that is not a year old.