Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.

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

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 only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

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

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

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.

Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.

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.

One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.

Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.

Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?

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