Our belief in education is unbounded, our reverence for it is unfaltering, our loyalty to it is unshaken by reverses. Our passionate desire, not so m….

A kitten is the most irresistible comedian in the world. Its wide-open eyes gleam with wonder and mirth. It darts madly at nothing at all, and then, ….

Like simplicity and candor, and other much-commented qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its char….

The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral ….

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fea….

If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes..

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing..

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage..

Wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more lasting in its qualities..

The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to hono….

It is difficult to admonish Frenchmen. Their habit of mind is unfavorable to preachment..

Every misused word revenges itself forever upon a writer's reputation..

Economics and ethics have little in common..

Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invi….

Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. ... under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any de….

If we go to church we are confronted with a system of begging so complicated and so resolute that all other demands sink into insignificance by its s….

Love is a malady, the common symptoms of which are the same in all patients..

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its….

In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us..

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have bee….

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are….