It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.

I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?

It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

The great trues are too important to be new.

What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.