When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

It is hard to rescue a man from the slough of luxury and idleness combined. If anything can do it, it is a cradle filled annually.

Passionate love, I take it, rarely lasts long, and is very troublesome while it does last. Mutual esteem is very much more valuable.

A man's own dinner is to himself so important that he cannot bring himself to believe that it is a matter utterly indifferent to anyone else.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God. Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.