"People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect."

"Faith is a kind of betting or speculation."

"Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies."

"Neither have they hearts to stay Nor wit enough to run away."

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."

"Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character."

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all."

"It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents."

"It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly."

"We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him."

"I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy."

"The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science."

"Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well."

"Nobody shoots at Santa Claus."

"All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it."

"Prayers are to men as dolls are to children."

"A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide."

"I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies."

"The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion."

"They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'"

"Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order."

"It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper."

"The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt."

"Life is one long process of getting tired."

"The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them."

"Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children."

"There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness."

"My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine."

"Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them."

"Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure."

"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."

"Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God."

"If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take."

"Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes."

"Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden not silence."

"Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another."

"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."

"A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand."

"The want of money is the root of all evil."

"Our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us."

"The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

"No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction."

"Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it."

"From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right."

"Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons."

"If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole."

"A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words."

"Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know."

"There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death."

"If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason."