To call the world God is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym.

Night gives a black look to everything, whatever it may be.

If God made the world, I would not be that God, for the misery of the world would break my heart.

Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.

The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds.

The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.