The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

[Thomas Henry] Huxley is a very genial, comfortable being-yet with none of the noisy and windy geniality of some folks here, whom you find with their backs turned when you are responding to the remarks that they have made you.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.

To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.