Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.

Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle