“There are some achievements which are never done in the presence of those who hear of them. Catching salmon is one, and working all night is another.”

Fortune favors the brave; and the world certainly gives the most credit to those who are able to give an unlimited credit to themselves.

Don’t let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.

It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can’t fly away.

But mad people never die. That’s a well-known fact. They’ve nothing to trouble them, and they live for ever.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man’s interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

I ain’t a bit ashamed of anything.

Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.

A man’s love, till it has been chastened and fastened by the feeling of duty which marriage brings with it, is instigated mainly by the difficulty of pursuit.

They are gifted with the powers of being mothers, but not nursing mothers. Nature gives them bosoms for show, but not for use. So Lady Arabella had a wet-nurse.

It is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Any one prominent in affairs can always see when a man may steal a horse and when a man may not look over a hedge.

Nothing surely is as potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone.

When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.

How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.

Improvisation sometimes seemed more like jazz than acting, like verbal jazz, with the actors playing a theme back and forth, and then introducing another themeM

I was watching Revolution, and the things I did in that picture, holy smokes! I can’t believe I did that, it’s like another person. It’s the thought of it, it’s just appalling to me.

That is an important part of my success. Another big part of my success is that I hated not to finish a race.

There is a famous Russian cartoon in which a hippopotamus, in the bush, points out a zebra to another hippopotamus: ‘You see,’ he says, ‘now that’s formalism.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.