Honest unaffected distrust of human abilities under all circumstances is the surest sign of strength of mind.

The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.

The highest level than can be reached by a mediocre but experienced mind is a talent for uncovering the weaknesses of those greater than itself.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Imagine the world so greatly magnified that particles of light look like twenty-four-pound cannon balls.