Quotes by William Howells

• You'll find as you grow older that you weren't born such a great while ago after all. The time shortens up.
• Wisdom and goodness are twin-born, one heart must hold both sisters, never seen apart.
• What the American public wants in the theater is a tragedy with a happy ending.
• We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another, and only one interest at a time fills these.
• Tomorrow I shall be sixty-nine, but I do not seem to care. I did not start the affair, and I have not been consulted about it at any step.
• There will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.
• The conqueror is regarded with awe; the wise man commands our respect; but it is only the benevolent man that wins our affection.
• The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested.
• The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.
• He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.
• The action is best that secures the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
• Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.
• Primitive societies without religion have never been found.
• It is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.
• Is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?
• Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself.
• In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.
• If we like a man's dream, we call him a reformer; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank.
• How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?
• A man never sees all that his mother has been to him until it's too late to let her know that he sees it.
• The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.