Success is a consequence and must not be a goal. I've never sought it (though I desire it) and seek it less and less.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

A friend who dies, it's something of you who dies.

Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.