Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.

One cannot lay a foundation by scattering stones, nor is a reputation for good work to be got by strewing volumes about the world.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.