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.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.

That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.

There is not in the universe a more ridiculous, nor a more contemptible animal, than a proud clergyman.

And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as...

If books were Persian carpets, one would not look only at the outer side. because it is the stitch that makes a carpet wear, gives it its life and bloom.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general – as we all do in our dreams – I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well...

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favor of two.

When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.

I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.