Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

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

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.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.