“Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.”

“If time frightens us, this is because it works out the problem and the solution comes afterwards.”

London doesn't love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.

She had an unequalled gift, especially pen in hand, of squeezing big mistakes into small opportunities.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art ... what we are talking about -- and the only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I don't regret a single "excess" of my responsive youth -- I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

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

Sorrow comes in great waves ... but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot, and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out -- you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

"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?"

"I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."

"Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there."

"I have had the feeling that a properly constructed flying-machine should be capable of being flown as a kite; and conversely, that a properly constructed kite should be capable of use as a flying-machine when driven by its own propellers."

"Grand telegraphic discovery today … Transmitted vocal sounds for the first time ... With some further modification I hope we may be enabled to distinguish … the “timbre” of the sound. Should this be so, conversation viva voce by telegraph will be a fait accompli."

"The final result of our researches has widened the class of substances sensitive to light vibrations, until we can propound the fact of such sensitiveness being a general property of all matter."

"Washington is no place in which to carry out inventions"

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one that has opened for us."

"The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea."

"There are two critical points in every aerial flight-its beginning and its end."

"Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone."

"Man is the result of slow growth; that is why he occupies the position he does in animal life. What does a pup amount to that has gained its growth in a few days or weeks, beside a man who only attains it in as many years."

"Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."