Novelist

Toil is man's allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that's more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities.

There are some persons in this world, who, unable to give better proof of being wise, take a strange delight in showing what they think they have sagaciously read in mankind by uncharitable suspicions of them.

Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Let America first praise mediocrity even, in her children, before she praises... the best excellence in the children of any other land.

Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.