Quotes by novelists & essayists

A teacher's influence passes from student to student and generation to generation, so no one can say where it ends.

If you spend even a little less than you earn, you are fine. If you spend even a little more, you are in trouble. The size of the gap matters less than which side of the line you are on.

Whether something is beautiful depends on the person looking at it. There is no single standard everyone shares.

Beautiful things do not need a purpose to justify them. A flower blooming where no one sees it is reason enough in itself.

Jo March grumbles that Christmas is ruined because the family is too poor for gifts. The rest of the chapter shows the sisters discovering that giving to others makes the day.

The catchphrase of Sherlock Holmes, which he never says in the original stories. Holmes does say “Elementary” and “my dear Watson,” but never together.

Tiny Tim, a sick little boy from a poor family, asks God's blessing on everyone at the Christmas table. Dickens ends the whole book with it, turning a child's grace into a blessing on the reader.

Emerson means we become strong by harnessing forces greater than ourselves, like wind, water and great ideas, and letting them carry our work. Aim your effort in the direction those higher powers already move.

Thoreau explains why he moved to Walden Pond: to strip life down to its essentials and find out what it really has to teach, so that he would not reach death and discover he had not lived.

Scrooge, shown his own lonely grave, promises to live by the spirit of Christmas, meaning generosity and kindness, every day of the year, not just on December 25.

Austen's narrator states a “universal truth” that is really a joke: it is the families of single women who want a rich bachelor, not the bachelor who wants a wife.

Dickens describes the years before the French Revolution as a time of extremes, then adds the sting: it was much like his own day, when people also insisted everything was either the best or the worst.

Talking with her mother after Beth's death, Jo says no one loves you like a mother, while admitting she is starting to long for other kinds of love too.

Everyone, king or cobbler, feels something on New Year's Day, because it is the day from which we all count our time and reckon how much is left.

Everyone makes good resolutions on January 1 and breaks them within days. Twain teases his readers that they will soon be “paving hell” with their good intentions, as they do every year.

Acton's argument that historians should not excuse popes and kings because of their office. He wrote “tends to” corrupt, a qualification usually dropped.

At a holiday gathering, don't dwell on what the year has taken from you. Count what you still have, because everyone has many blessings and every life has some sorrow.

Twain's joke when a newspaper wrongly reported he was dying. His real words were drier: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Thoreau argues that most people work themselves to exhaustion for things they don't need, and hide their despair behind ordinary routines. Walden is his experiment in living otherwise.

The present day is never ordinary. Emerson warns against the illusion that the important moment is always somewhere else, and says today is the critical, decisive day.