Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.

Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.