A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.

The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd.

Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.