Chance is a name for our ignorance.

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

The only way in which one human being can properly attempt to influence another is by encouraging him to think for himself, instead of endeavoring to instill ready-made opinions into his head.

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

I believe that the ascent of mountains forms an essential chapter in the complete duty of man, and that it is wrong to leave any district without setting foot on its highest peak.

The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

You can't live your life for other people. You've got to do what's right for you, even if it hurts some people you love.

Writer's a lovers quarrel - encounters breathe the quill...

...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.

I'm brave to say that I won't take this sort of risk.

In [my] life ... I did not understand steam machinery, but I tried to understand that much more complicated piece of mechanism - man.

In Cookie's defense, it was raining wildcats and rabid dogs.

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.

Jokes are one of the things that bind the culture. If you can't have jokes about everybody in society and if one group is hedged off and protected then that group can never truly be integrated.

Three thousand, it's just a number. It's just a game