Money was their God; work their religion.

We never know the timber of a man's soul until something cuts into him deeply and brings the grain out strong. You've the making of a mighty fine piece of furniture.

When any man accumulates more than he can earn with his own hands, he begins to enrich himself at the expense of the youth, the sweat, the blood, the joy of his fellow men.

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be...gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier...it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw for himself and leads him one step toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book.

The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.

we know by the odour that occasionally we are visited by skunks, which are not poetic but very beautiful.

What was money that it should make such dreadful things of men and women?