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

The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.

To buy books would be a good thing if we could also buy the time to read them; but the purchase of books is often mistaken for the assimilation and mastering of their contents.

Men are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain that what a man IS contributes more to his happiness than what he HAS.

To form a judgment intuitively is the privilege of few; authority and example lead the rest of the world. They see with the eyes of others, they hear with the ears of others. Therefore it is very easy to think as all the world now think; but to think as all the world will think thirty years hence is not in the power of every one.

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet man believes that death is the annhilation of his being.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.