Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

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.

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

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.

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

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