For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.

While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, – in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.

We do not believe in immortality because we can’t prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible...

A Queen, or a Prime Minister’s secretary may be shot at in London, as we know; and probably there is no person eminent in literature or otherwise who has not been the object of some infirm brain or another. But in America the evil is sadly common.

Leisure, some degree of it, is necessary to the health of every man’s spirit.

The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, – an almost insignificant measure of time; before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other...

It never enters the lady’s head that the wet-nurse’s baby probably dies.

I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart’s-love for legal prostitution.

The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work.