“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

Everyone lives by selling something.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

A dishonor greater than any affair, is that of a friend who never was.

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.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

It was only one life. What is one life in the affairs of a state?

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

The happiest moments in any affair take place after the loved one has learned to accommodate the lover and before the maddening personality of either party has emerged like a jagged rock from the receding tides of lust and curiosity.