It’s a funny thing about life. If you refuse to settle for anything less than the best, that’s what it will give you.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life.