What a man marries for's hard to tell ... an' what a woman marries for's past findin' out.

Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.

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

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

... the life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.