It is always "Youth, youth," when there is nothing else to be said.

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience.

The time's come: there's a terrific thunder-cloud advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up....It's going to blow away all this idleness and indifference, and prejudice against work....I'm going to work, and in twenty-five or thirty years' time every man and woman will be working.

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Death is terrifying, but it would be even more terrifying to find out that you are going to live forever and never die.

Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.