Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.

Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.