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

A man’s mind will very gradually refuse to make itself up until it is driven and compelled by emergency.

After money in the bank, a grudge is the next best thing.

The mind of the thinker and the student is driven to admit, though it be awe-struck by apparent injustice, that this inequality is the work of God.

I run great risk of failing. It may be that I shall encounter ruin where I look for reputation and a career of honor.

Of all the needs a book has the chief need is that it be readable.

Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

The happiest man is he, who being above the troubles which money brings, has his hands the fullest of work.

A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can’t show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.

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.

If any such point out to us our follies, we at once claim those follies as the special evidence of our wisdom.

Men are cowards before women until they become tyrants.

True love has nothing to do with liking someone, agreeing with him or her or being compatible. It is a love of unity, a love of seeing God wearing all the masks, and recognising itself in them all..

The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.

To answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

Zionism and pessimism are not compatible.

Compatibility brings us together, but unity keeps us together.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.