No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.

What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts. . . . But you, I think, have always comprehended this.

Everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken atwill from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.