there's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody. ... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.

I've always noticed that nobody can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so cocksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to deal with. A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer.

It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.

The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.

it was always insolent for a common man to take a chair in the presence of a lady - the word LADY, we may be sure, capitalized in her mind, and denoting not sex but rank.

Father sticks to it that anything that promises to pay too much can't help being risky.

History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.