I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

To live in the world of creation-to get into it and stay in it-to frequent it and haunt it...to think intently and fruitfully, to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation-this is the only thing

You think too much.' 'I suppose I do; but I can’t help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches--a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

She is the one who leads the people of Little Egg Harbor to freedom.

I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.

People can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock of their freedom ticking as loud as it seems to do here--to keep an eye on the fleeting hour.

There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it-this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education.

One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

Of course you're always at liberty to judge the critic. Judge people as critics, however, and you'll condemn them all!

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

...I am incapable of telling you not to feel. Feel, feel, I say - feel for all you're worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live...

To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.

Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head.

God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.

You seemed to me to be soaring far up in the blue - to be sailing in the bright light, over the heads of men. Suddenly some one tosses up a faded rosebud - a missile that should never have reached you - and down you drop to the ground.

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

Every governmental institution has been a standing testimony to the harmonic destiny of society, a standing proof that the life of man is destined for peace and amity, instead of disorder and contention.

The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.

If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?

If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify.

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.