To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?

I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me.

I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

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