The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.

Where there is no imagination there is no horror.

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.

Today's sales should be better than yesterday's - and worse than tomorrow's.

It's a good thing that beauty is only skin deep, or I'd be rotten to the core.

Once cats were all wild, but afterward they retired to houses.

Nature compensates for its mistakes.

And for a minute, maybe longer... everything that threatens us, threatens to save us.

wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn't reading.

Perhaps all human progress stems from the tension between two basic drives: to have just what everyone else has and to have what no one has.

Nothin'," Alex says. "We'll talk later, chica. It's not a big deal." "Don't chica me, Alex," his bride snaps. "I think she's gonna deck him," Ben murmurs, amused.

While "9 Songs" is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its directness is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.

All animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time.