“...if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.”

“If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.”

“To make clever people believe we are what we are not is in most instances harder than really to become what we want to seem to be.”

“The excuses we make to ourselves when we want to do something are excellent material for soliloquies, for they are rarely made except when we are alone, and are very often made aloud.”

“There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.”

“With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.”

“One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.”