I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could…

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity.

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him.

There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and …

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything.