The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
There is an innate decorum in man, and it is not fair to thrust Truth upon people when they don’t expect it. Only the very generous are ready for Truth impromptu.
It will be a shock to men when they realize that thoughts that were fast enough for today are not fast enough for tomorrow. But thinking tomorrow’s thoughts today is one kind of future life.
Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.
The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds; They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads; They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight, And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!
The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world – the brains of men.
It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.
The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.
I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small – like looking at the Big Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you.
The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature’s compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.
This book Is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read it anywhere else.
There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.
A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.
None of the neighbouring ladies would stand as godmother, for they were secretly dubious as to the children’s origin; so he had asked good Mrs. Spaniel to act in that capacity. She, a simple kindly creature, was much flattered, though certainly she can have understood very little of the symbolical rite. Gissing, filling out the form that Mr. Poodle had given him, had put down the names of an entirely imaginary brother and sister-in-law of his, “deceased,” whom he asserted as the parents.