How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world around them.

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up.

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

No one in this country has any root anywhere; we don't live in America, we board here, we are like spiders that run over the surface of the water.