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 about them. People of small caliber are always carping. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or prowess or good breeding. But magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And what is more, they find it everywhere.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

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.

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

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

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.