Dignity is an anachronism.
One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world...
Nobody, not even the old, not even the despairing, wished to come to an end in time or in eternity.
The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author’s success – the true success so different from the ephemeral – is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.
To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.
I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.
America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind.
O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!
Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.
Theories have nothing to do with life...
Borrowed illusions are better than none...
The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.
Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.
To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.
The only natural human beings seem to be those who are making trouble.
There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.
There is a terrible loneliness in the spring...
So long as one is able to pose one has still much to learn about suffering.
Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.
She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.