Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.

A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

I hate to write, but I love to have written.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.