Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

All is a riddle, and the key to a riddle...is another riddle.

It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.