"Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and to have her nonsense respected."

"I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early."

"Nothing puzzles me more than the time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less."

"Cards are war, in disguise of a sport."

"He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides."

"The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days."

"A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market."

"Riches are chiefly good because they give us time."

"I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible."

"We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself."

"Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year."

"For thy sake, tobacco, I would do anything but die."

"It is good to love the unknown."

"I could never hate anyone I knew."

"Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral."

"The measure of choosing well, is, whether a man likes and finds good in what he has chosen."

"The teller of a mirthful tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with less than absolute truth."

"Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book."

"My motto is: Contented with little, yet wishing for more."

"I have had playmates, I have had companions; In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days - All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."

"Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other."

"The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility, you are not attractive - you are leaking."

"The beggar wears all colors fearing none."

"Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts."

"We grow gray in our spirit long before we grow gray in our hair."

"The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend."

"A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."

"To be sick is to enjoy monarchical prerogatives."

"Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing."

"Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it."

"Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever."

"The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street."

"Pain is life - the sharper, the more evidence of life."

"What is reading, but silent conversation."

"Let us live for the beauty of our own reality."

"She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book."

"New Year's Day is every man's birthday."

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

"I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is."

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds.... Books think for me."

"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins."

"The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident."

"Don't introduce me to that man! I want to go on hating him, and I can't hate a man whom I know."

"Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!"

"My theory is to enjoy life, but the practice is against it."

"I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading, I cannot sit and think. Books think for me"

"Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door."

"Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment."

"Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart."

"Rather was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest?"