Quotes

No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

We must scrunch or be scrunched.

No one is useless in this world ... who lightens the burden of it for any one else.

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes , which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble as it pleases. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us, and even if we dream, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibility to separate the two.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people we most despise.

Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.

Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.

Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.

It is a hopeless endeavour to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.

When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.

There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.

It is no small thing, when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.