Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn.

Resistance, which is the function of conservatism, is essential to orderly advance.

Books that children read but once are of scant service to them; those that have really helped to warm our imaginations and to train our faculties are the few old friends we know so well that they have become a portion of our thinking selves.

There is no liberal education for the under-languaged.

Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. ... under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

if a man be discreet enough to take to hard drinking in his youth, before his general emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably credit him with a host of shining qualities which, we are given to understand, lie balked and frustrated by his one unfortunate weakness.