“One’s mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.”

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

I never enter a new company without the hope that I may discover a friend, perhaps the friend, sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survives a thousand disappointments.

Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

Keeping up appearances is the most expensive thing in the world.

Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.

I don’t like authority, at least I don’t like other people’s authority.

It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.

A well begun is half ended.

I expect that all of us get pretty much what we deserve of appreciation.

Do you know the times when one seems to stick fast in circumstances like the fly in the jam-pot? It can’t be helped, and I suppose the best thing to do is to lay in a good store of jam!

The joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way.

I am sure it is one’s duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one’s own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another.

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

It seems sometimes as if one were powerless to do any more from within to overcome troubles, and that help must come from without.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

When Fate wills that something should come to pass, she sends forth a million of little circumstances to clear and prepare the way.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

All things will be clear and distinct to the man who does not hurry; haste is blind and improvident.