“Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

“It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries,to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.”

“There are two things children should get from their parents: roots and wings.”

“Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.”

“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”

“To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.”

“In this world one is seldom reduced to make a selection between two alternatives. There are as many varieties of conduct and opinion as there are turns of feature between an aquiline nose and a flat one.”