[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.