Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.

It is yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level?.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense

Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.