I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.
To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
If we take matrimony at it’s lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognised by the police.
The essence of love is kindness.
So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.
In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day.
A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
The bourgeoisie’s weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.
The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.
The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.
Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.
The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery.
Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity.
And every day when I’ve been good, I get an orange after food.
Make up your mind to be happy.
Going for character: why not now, and where you stand?
We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.
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.