Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we must have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it - thought 'furiously' often. And it is out of the many 'thinkings' of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows.

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.