Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
It is a rare privilege to watch the birth, growth, and first feeble struggles of a living mind; this privilege is mine.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
