The best education is to be had at a price, as well as the best broadcloth.
A fellow oughtn’t to let his family property go to pieces.
I believe journalism is coming to be regarded as quite a respectable occupation for gentlemen nowadays.
A novelist’s characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.
Why is it that when men and women congregate, though the men may beat the women in numbers by ten to one, and through they certainly speak the louder, the concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women’s voices?
If a cook can’t make soup between two and seven, she can’t make it in a week.
Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.
An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.
A man’s love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.
Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small dainty task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.
Speaking of New York as a traveller I have two faults to find with it. In the first place there is nothing to see; and in the second place there is no mode of getting about to see anything.
The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.
Dance with a girl three times, and if you like the light of her eye and the tone of voice with which she, breathless, answers your little questions about horseflesh and music about affairs masculine and feminine, then take the leap in the dark.
When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.
There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
I do not know whether there be, as a rule, more vocal expression of the sentiment of love between a man and a woman, than there is between two thrushes. They whistle and call to each other, guided by instinct rather than by reason.
Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable.
It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.
This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.