The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.

A man thirty years old, I said to myself, should have his field of life all ploughed, and his planting well done; for after that it is summer time.

Would you hurt a man keenest strike at his self-love?

As a rule, there is no surer way to the dislike of men than to behave well where they have behaved badly.

A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.

When people are lonely they stoop to any companionship.