For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.