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

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

“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. ”

“Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide.”

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

“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”

“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?”