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

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

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.