“The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.”

“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”

“But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.”

“The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.”

“A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.”

“If you follow the ways in which you were trained, which you may have inherited, for no other reason than this, you are illogical.”

“True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.”

“A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.”