Something ignoble, loathsome, undignified attends all associations between people and has been transferred to all objects, dwelling, tools, even the landscape itself.
America: the only country in the world where failing to promote yourself is regarded as being arrogant.
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
A good listener is usually thinking about something else.
Carlyle said, “A lie cannot live”; it shows he did not know how to tell them.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Any ordinary man can…surround himself with two thousand books…and thenceforward have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.
No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.