You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.

I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!