Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.

A man who loses his money gains, at the least, experience, and sometimes, something better.

The reasonable man will adjust to the demands of his environment. The unreasonable man expects his environment to adjust to his own needs. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.