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.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful, the formation of fixed habits of work.

... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.

It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.

It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.

The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep,and to study; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between.