General rules will bear hard on particular cases.

No ornament of a house can compare with books; they are constant company in a room, even when you are not reading them.

One would like to be grand and heroic, if one could; but if not, why try at all? One wants to be very something, very great, very heroic; or if not that, then at least very stylish and very fashionable. It is this everlasting mediocrity that bores me.

A ship is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it.

The number of those men who know how to use wholly irresponsible power humanely and generously is small. Everybody knows this, and the slave knows it best of all.

In the gates of eternity the black hand and the white hand hold each other with equal clasp.

Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.