For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.