People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.

Knowing what you can not do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that’s good taste.

Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

I am sure it is one’s duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one’s own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.

Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.

One’s mind has a way of making itself up in the background, and it suddenly becomes clear what one means to do.

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

Man, an animal that makes bargains.

All the best stories are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

A well begun is half ended.

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way.