Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the earth peopled as ever by the inept..

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down..

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are..

It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is ex….

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere..

Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the ….

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature..

There are people who balk at small civilities on account of their manifest insincerity. ... It is better and more logical to accept all the polite ph….

Men who believe that, through some exceptional grace or good fortune, they have found God, feel little need of culture..

The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no mo….

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing d….

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts - facts that refuse to be soft….

People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything..

Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times, because they had nobody to talk about..

If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee ….

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do..

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh..

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can t….

Wit is artificial; humor is natural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, of the allotted ironies of fate.….

In the stress of modern life, how little room is left for that most comfortable vanity that whispers in our ears that failures are not faults! Now we….

Conversation in its happiest development is a link, equally exquisite and adequate, between mind and mind, a system by which men approach one another….