“In these days a man is nobody unless his biography is kept so far posted up that it may be ready for the national breakfast-table on the morning after his demise.”

He should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.

What is there that money will not do?

People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

I judge a man by his actions with men, much more than by his declarations Godwards.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

Of Dickens’ style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules…

Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.

Of all hatreds that the world produces, a wife’s hatred for her husband, when she does hate him, is the strongest.

Let a man be of what side he may in politics, unless he be much more of a partisan than a patriot, he will think it well that there should be some equity of division in the bestowal of crumbs of comfort.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?…Was ever anything so civil?

The concrete sound that meets the ears of any outside listener is always a sound of women’s voices?

I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

If a cook can’t make soup between two and seven, she can’t make it in a week.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

So as not to disturb me in my little nook behind the biography shelves.

I very rarely read any fiction. I love biographies; I read about all kinds of people.

A singer’s biographical film should have their music and their voice.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

[George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.

My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.

Tycho, we’re about to achieve a tremendous victory we don’t want.” “We’ll put that in your biography. General Antilles was so good he couldn’t fail when he tried to.” “Thanks.” Wedge & Tycho