The best thing I know between France and England is the sea.
Religion is in the heart, not in the knees.
Even the worse of jobs has their pleasures, if I were a grave digger or a hangmen, there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.
There is peace more destructive of the manhood of living man than war is destructive of his material body.
The sharp employ the sharp.
Some people are so fond of ill luck that they run halfway to meet it.
He was so benevolent, so merciful a man that, in his mistaken passion, he would have held an umbrella over a duck in a shower of rain.
Literature, like a gypsy, to be picturesque, should be a little ragged.
The language of women should be luminous, but not voluminous.
I never hear the rattling of dice that it does not sound to me like the funeral bell of the whole family.
A pill that the present moment is daily bread to thousands.
Love the sea? I dote upon it – from the beach.
He who owns the soil, owns up to the sky.
Dogmation is puppyism come to its full growth.
A piece of simple goodness – a letter gushing from the heart; a beautiful unstudied vindication of the worth and untiring sweetness of human nature – a record of the invulnerability of man, armed with high purpose, sanctified by truth.
A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that ‘ancient institution’ the old one.
A coquette is like a recruiting sergeant, always on the lookout for fresh victims.
As for the brandy, “nothing extenuate”; and the water, put nought in in malice.
Luck, mere luck may make even madness wisdom.
A creature undefiled by the taint of the world, unvexed by its injustice, unwearied by its hollow pleasures; a being fresh from the source of light, with something of its universal lustre in it. If childhood be this, how holy the duty to see that in its onward growth it shall be no other!