Newspapers. . . give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details. . .

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

Let us have no machine-made ornament at all; it is all bad and worthless and ugly.

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us