To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.

I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.