I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

A Parliament is nothing less than a big meeting of more or less idle people.

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.