The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows. The greatest of faults, I should say is to be conscious of none.

Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.

Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her light-beam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.

Know what thou canst work at, and work at it like a Hercules.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.