Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
God is for men, and religion for women.
One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death.
I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.
Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.