Writer Quotes

From your confessor, lawyer and physician, hide not your case on no condition.

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise.

There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver the mind cannot use its wings, - the clearest proof that it is out of its element.

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.

Nothing is farther than earth from heaven; nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Nothing good bursts forth all at once. The lightning may dart out of a black cloud; but the day sends his bright heralds before him, to prepare the world for his coming.

Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of being grandiloquent.

It is with flowers as with moral qualities; the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

Examples would indeed be excellent things were not people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none will follow them.

Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.

A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. Doubtless, as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins and guiding them.

What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even than what he condemns, of his own character, information and abilities.

Only when the voice of duty is silent, or when it has already spoken, may we allowably think of the consequences of a particular action.

A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt fated support them through great actions.

A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.

The virtue of paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.

As to the pure all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are impure.

Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, yet both actively working together.

The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.

What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud.

Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

You know, it's sort of common wisdom among New York publishers that short story collections don't make money.

You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, somet