An excessive preponderance of an idealistic mood is harmful to society: it creates daydreaming, political Don Quixotism, hope for heavenly intervention. This is an undeniable truth--but it is also true that every extreme is harmful.

I go to church because I am a skeptic in regard to my own skepticism.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.

Amid the stillness of the night, in the depths of the ravine, from the direction in which the corpses lay suddenly resounded a kind of inhuman, frightful laughter in which quivered despair, and joy, and cruelty, and suffering, and pain, and sobbing, and derision; the heart-rending and spasmodic laughter of the insane or condemned.

Day is like day as two beads in a rosary, unless changes of weather form the only variety.

England is never in a hurry because she is eternal.