Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.

If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

What is essential does not die but clarifies.