Lew Wallace

“The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.”

“Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.”

“Perfection is God; simplicity is perfection. The curse of curses is that men will not let truths like these alone.”

“What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.”

“Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.”

“Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away,but love stays with us. Love is God.”

“I would have had to kill him, and Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.”

“I know what I should love to do–to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing–one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.”

“The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.”

“beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“Latin is an abomination!”

“I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.”