Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.

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.

Its a toss-up when you decide to leave the beaten track. Many are called, few are chosen.

The first duty of a woman is to be pretty, the second is to be well-groomed, and the third is never to contradict.

Perfect is determined in shortened measures of time, not over long periods of time or lifetimes. It would be unnatural.