idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.

Knowledge, like experience, is valid in fiction only after it has dissolved and filtered down through the imagination into reality.

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.

convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.

No life is so hard that you can't make it easier by the way you take it for example by seeing it how it could be worse and then being grateful it isn't.

Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.