Our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us.
The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.
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.
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
The advantage of doing one's praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
Man unlike the animal has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.
Neither have they hearts to stay Nor wit enough to run away.
Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.
I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
All animals except man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.
I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.