“And earth was heaven a little the worse for wear. And heaven was earth, done up again to look like new. ”

“I am a bundle of nerves dressed up to look like a man!”

“Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn't exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you!--you have married a monster.”

“I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.”

“Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if only you pull it in the right way.”

“The books—the generous friends who met me without suspicion—the merciful masters who never used me ill! The only years of my life that I can look back on with something like pride... Early and late, through the long winter nights and the quiet summer days, I drank at the fountain of knowledge, and never wearied of the draught.”

“In all my experience along the dirtiest ways of this dirty little world, I have never met with such a thing as a trifle yet.”