Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their joys may lie outside.

An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteach-able brat, well birched and none the wiser.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.