There is a natural limit to the success we wish our friends, even when we have spurred them on their way.

The clear-sighted do not rule the world, but they sustain and console it.

There is something frightful in being required to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces; to read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cervantes, and Molière, and Swift.

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.

No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.

Philadelphians are every whit as mediocre as their neighbors, but they seldom encourage each other in mediocrity by giving it a more agreeable name.

The diseases of the present have little in common with the diseases of the past save that we die of them.