The principal duty which a parent owes a child is to make him happy.

Not only humble but umble which I look upon to be the comparative, or, indeed, superlative degree.

Marriage means tyranny on one side and deceit on the other.

Make all men equal today, and God has so created them that they shall all be unequal tomorrow.

One doesn’t have an agreement to that effect written down on parchment and sealed; but it is as well understood and ought to be as faithfully kept as any legal contract.

Of course he had committed forgery; – of course he had committed robbery. That, indeed, was nothing, for he had been cheating and forging and stealing all his life.

Men very skilful in unravelling such mysteries were sent to Paris, and the police of that capital entered upon the search with most praiseworthy zeal. But the number of life-preservers which had been sold altogether baffled them. It seemed that nothing was so common as that gentlemen should walk about with bludgeons in their pockets covered with leathern thongs.

Dr. Tempest was well known among his parishioners to be hard and unsympathetic, some said unfeeling also, and cruel; but it was admitted by those who disliked him the most that he was both practical and just, and that he cared for the welfare of many, though he was rarely touched by the misery of one.

A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you’d like to get.

They two men cut the door, and took the box, and opened it, – and when they’d opened it, they didn’t get the swag. Where was the swag?