All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

When we look in to the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

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.