In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature the oldest.

In belief lies the secret of all valuable exertion.

Ambition has no rest.

Master books, but do not let them master you.

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.