A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.

You cannot have a theory without principles. Principles is another name for prejudices.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

Talent without work is useless, thank God

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.