"Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them!"

"Stupid people, people who do not know how to laugh, are always pompous and self-conceited."

"When I say I know women, I mean I know that I don't know them. Every single woman I ever knew is a puzzle to me, as I have no doubt she is to herself."

"Let us be very gentle with our neighbours' failings; and forgive our friends their debts, as we hope ourselves to be forgiven."

"I set it down as a maxim that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social."

"Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society."

"Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim. Attacking is his only secret. Dare, and the world always yields: or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb."

"The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward."

"A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one."

"I should like to see before I die, and think of it daily more and more, the commencement of Jesus Christ's christianism in the world, where I am sure people may be made a hundred times happier than by its present forms, Judaism, ascenticism, Bullarism."

"Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for any one who dies."

"She looks so haughty that I should have thought her a princess at the very least, with a pedigree reaching as far back as the Deluge. But this lady was no better born than many other ladies who give themselves airs; and all sensible people laughed at her absurd pretensions."

"Profoundly grateful, and as if I had swallowed a small baby. … Why, they are perfect beasts of oysters!"

"To be beautiful is enough. If a woman can do that well, who shall demand more from her? You don't want a rose to sing."

"The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?"

"What money is better bestowed than that of a schoolboy's tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes."

"The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors."

"What stories are new? All types of all characters march through all fables."

"Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it."

"We love being in love, that's the truth on't."

"Dick never thought that his bottle companion was a butt to aim at—only a friend to shake by the hand."

"I think Steele shone rather than sparkled."

"If there is a verity in wine, according to the old adage, what an amiable-natured character Dick's must have been! In proportion as he took in wine he overflowed with kindness."

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write."

"'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel."

"'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard, Master Harry — every man of every nation has done that — 'tis the living up to it that is difficult, as I know to my cost."

". . . the devil never dies"

"It is our duty never to speak ill of others, you know; least of all when we know that to do so will be the cause of much pain and trouble."

"To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal."

"Haggard is the text-book case of the mythopoeic gift pure and simple... Haggard's best work will survive because it is based on an appeal well above high-water mark. The fullest tides of fashion cannot demolish it. A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis."

"Rider Haggard was perhaps the greatest of all the writers who enchanted us when we were young. Enchantment is just what he exercised; he fixed pictures in our minds that thirty years have been unable to wear away."

"To Mr. Kipling as to Mr. Haggard I owe a debt of gratitude for having stimulated my youthful imagination and this I gladly acknowledge, but Mr. Wells I have never read and consequently his stories of Mars could not have influenced me in any way."

"Sir Rider Haggard Was completely staggered When his bride-to-be Announced "I AM SHE!""

"Then he went off to bed."

". . . they [the Walloos] are but the rotting stump of a tree that once was tall and fair. The dust of Time hides many such stumps . . . But what of that? Other fine trees are growing which also will become stumps in their season, and so on for ever."

". . . little in the world is pretty, except the world itself."

"when men seek a god . . . they make one like themselves, only larger, uglier, and more evil . . . Also, often they say that this god was once their king, since at the bottom all worship their ancestors who gave them life, if they worship anything at all, and often, too, because they gave them life, they think that they must have been devils. Great ancestors were the first gods . . . and if they had not been evil they would never have been great. Look at Chaka, the Lion of the Zulus. He is called great because he was so wicked and cruel, and so it was and is with others if they succeed, though, if they fail, men speak otherwise of them."

"The world is very old and there have been peoples in it of whom we have heard nothing"

"Is it not so with many of the gods men set up? They are not and never were, but their priests are and shake the spear of power and pierce the hearts of men with terrors. What, then, does it matter about the gods whom no man sees, when the priest is there shaking the spear of power and piercing the hearts of their worshippers? The god is the priest or the priest is the god—have it which way you like"

"Life is more than gold . . . and great honour is better than both."

". . . those who worship the Black One [i.e. the Devil], at last the Black One takes by the throat."

"When I admit neglect of Gissing, They say I don't know what I'm missing. Until their arguments are subtler, I think I'll stick to Samuel Butler."

"As a matter of derivation, Mr Gissing, in his earlier essays in fiction, owed more to Dickens than to any realistic novelist. ... The inspiration was indirect. Mr Gissing had not the master-faculty of 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' and he did not counterfeit it. But in studying the works of Dickens, he appears to have seen how much of the real gloom had been left out of the picture of the London populace; how much what was eccentric and humorous had been insisted upon, and how much what was joyless, and yet equally representative, had been omitted; and this darker and more unrelieved side of lower London life Mr Gissing determined to describe."

"Gissing, whose work Henry James admired, said that in all character there sits a mind, and that the mind of the dullest is not dull because, at its lowest, it will at least reflect the social dilemma."

"Time is money — says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth —money is time. I think of it on these dark, mist-blinded mornings, as I come down to find a glorious fire crackling and leaping in my study. Suppose I were so poor that I could not afford that heartsome blaze, how different the whole day would be! Have I not lost many and many a day of my life for lack of the material comfort which was necessary to put my mind in tune? Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman. Money is time, and, heaven be thanked, there needs so little of it for this sort of purchase. He who has overmuch is wont to be as badly off in regard to the true use of money, as he who has not enough. What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other."

"For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously."