Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often not. Life is a dream surely.

I ride rough waters, and shall sink with no one to save me.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

If we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?