Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.

Incessant company is as bad as solitary confinement.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.