Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.

Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.