Steady work turns genius to a loom.

The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.

After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

What people do who go into politics I can't think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.

autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.