Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

There's no such thing as old age; there is only sorrow.

It was the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above coura…