to be honest and yet popular is almost as difficult in literature as it is in life.

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

Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.

women love with their imagination and men with their senses.

Surely the novel should be a form of art - but art was not enough. It must contain not only the perfection of art, but the imperfection of nature.

Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.

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.