It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.