Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.

Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

Truth, like climate, is common property.

Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.

... it seems to have been my luck to stumble into various forms of progress, to which I have been of the smallest possible use; yet for whose sake I have suffered the discomfort attending all action in moral improvements, without the happiness of knowing that this was clearly quite worth while.

Life is moral responsibility.