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.

All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.

you can't fit the same religion to every man any mo' than you can the same pair of breeches. The big man takes the big breeches an' the little man takes the small ones, an' it's jest the same with religion. It may be cut after one pattern, but it's might apt to get its shape from the wearer inside. Why, thar ain't any text so peaceable that it ain't drawn blood from somebody.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

A good novel cannot be too long or a bad novel too short.

He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it, that counted - and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.