I write as the birds sing, because I must, and usually from the same source of inspiration.

Now what is a guest? A thing of a day! A person who disturbs your routine and interferes with important concerns. Why should any one be grateful for company? Why should time and money be lavished on visitors? They come. You overwork yourself. They go. You are glad of it. You return the visit, because it's the only way to have back at them.

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

there was nothing in the whole world so dreadful as the power of riches wrongly used.

How a big majority of book critics and authors have come to believe and to teach that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life, God knows.

I do not believe there is any one study that can be taken up that will broaden the imagination, that will be the source from which will spring more deep thinking and sincere research than the study of astronomy.

Nature always levies her tribute.