“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.”

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.

Audacity in wooing is a great virtue, but a man must measure even his virtues.

When it comes to money nobody should give up anything.

I am not fit to marry. I am often cross, and I like my own way, and I have a distaste for men.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.

I was more inclined to think of it as “writer’s impatience”, and to follow Arthur Koestler’s dictum: “Soak; and wait.

I’m more inclined to linger in the science pages of ‘The Week’ magazine.

I am somehow inclined to move against this current, in search of what it might mean to be connected not just spiritually, but also vertically.

The people that are inclined to hate, are also inclined to be losers.

The dank night is sweeping down from the sky and the setting stars incline our heads to sleep.