Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.

He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.