Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

Books are like imprisoned souls until someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

The major sin is the sin of being born.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

He that complies against his will Is of his own opinion still.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.

The principal business of life is to enjoy it.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

All animals except man know that the ultimate of life is to enjoy it.

Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded.

Union may be strength, but it is mere brute strength unless wisely directed.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Der Unterschied zwischen Gott und einem Historiker: Gott kann die Vergangenheit nicht ndern.

Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it - torn up to irrecoverable tatters.