“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.”

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

“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.”

“I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.”

“The flesh of animals who feed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?”

“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.”

“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.”