My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.