“I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

I have procured air [oxygen] between five and six times as good as the best common air that I have ever met with.

Some say it is best not to go near the center of time.

That’s what I do this for, to secure my family’s future. I don’t care about anything else. I’m able to spoil people, and that’s the best thing.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.

You know, missing someone can sometimes be the best thing for a writer.

In every aspect of life, have a game plan, and then do your best to achieve it.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.