I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

Every one lives by selling something.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.

The world has no room for cowards.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

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.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.