“In serving the wicked, expect no reward, and be thankful if you escape injury for your pains.”

There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them.

There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them.

Better to starve free than be a fat slave.

Better to starve free than be a fat slave.

Do not attempt to hide things which cannot be hidden.

Please all, and you will please none.

Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.

The more you want, the more you stand to lose.

In union, there is strength.

Don’t neglect the future in times of plenty, for tomorrow you may need what you wasted today.

A doubtful friend is worse than a certain enemy. Let a man be one thing or the other, and we then know how to meet him.

Betray a friend, and you’ll often find you have ruined yourself.

It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.

Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.

To be well prepared for war is the best guarantee of peace.

Don’t be in a hurry to change one evil for another.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The ‘punch’ of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law – an imaginative escape from palling reality – hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical ‘heroes.’

Yes. A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him the damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.