We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.

Petty laws breed great crimes.

An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through.

Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.

Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! — what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.

There is perhaps no surer mark of folly, than to attempt to correct natural infirmities of those we love.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

Tis this desire of bending all things to our own purposes which turns them into confusion and is the chief source of every error in our lives.

I’m not very interested in charting a day-to-day familiar reality. I’m always looking for territory in which to explore the BIG subjects, the life-or-death stories.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

Do you spell it with a “V” or a “W”?’ inquired the judge. ‘That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord’.

Without adversity a person hardly knows whether they are honest or not.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

Nothing shows up the difference between the things said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

And I don’t like books which are full of name dropping.

Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity then they really are.

All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.