I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.

I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature.... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

So long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will be indirect.

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.