A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanised

He who wants to do everything will never do anything.

If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.

I knew a man who had been virtually drowned and then revived. He said that his death had not been painful.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.