Carolyn Wells
A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.
Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife; This simple boon I beg of Fate - A thousand years of Middle Life.
Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive.
Of two evils choose the prettier.
A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye.
A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.
It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.
I am more fond of achieving than striving. My theories must prove to be facts or be discarded as worthless. My efforts must soon be crowned with success, or discontinued.
Happiness is the ability to recognize it.Collection: Happiness
Nonsense makes the heart grow fonder.Collection: Heart
Take care of your common sense, and your dignity will take care of itsselfCollection: Common Sense
One of the first principles of perseverance is to know when to stop persevering.Collection: Perseverance
The way to do some things is to do them.Collection: Way
Invitation is the sincerest flattery.Collection: Flattery
A living gale is better than a dead calm.Collection: Gale
Every dogma must have its day.Collection: Dogma
Patriotism covers a multitude of sins.Collection: Patriotism
We should live and learn; but by the time we've learned, it's too late to live.Collection: Knowledge
The wages of sin is alimony.Collection: Infidelity
When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.Collection: Book
Advice ... is a habit-forming drug. You give a dear friend a bit of advice today, and next week you find yourself advising two or three friends, and the week after, a dozen, and the week following, crowds!Collection: Next Week
Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife, This simple boon I beg of Fate - A thousand years of Middle Life.Collection: Stupid
Where there's a will there's a detective story.Collection: Stories
Contentment is the result of a limited imagination.Collection: Imagination
A critic is a necessary evil, and criticism is an evil necessity.Collection: Evil
What is a magazine? A small body of Literature entirely surrounded by advertisements.Collection: Magazines
Reward is its own virtue.Collection: Rewards
Wall Street. - The abode of the Brokers and the Broke.Collection: Wall
I'm just the same age I've always been.Collection: Age
Insistent advice may develop into interference, and interference, someone has said, is the hind hoof of the devil.Collection: Advice
Society's the mother of convention.Collection: Mother
Circumstances alter faces.Collection: Faces
Flirtation envies Love, and Love envies Flirtation.Collection: Flirting
There are many ways of discarding [books]. You can give them to friends,--or enemies,--or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.Collection: Friendship
At times there is nothing so unnatural as nature.Collection: Nature
musicians rarely have a sense of humour, at least, about themselves.Collection: Humor
In December people give no thought to the Past or the Future. They thing only of the Present.Collection: Past
You wouldn't believe On All Hallow Eve What lots of fun we can make, With apples to bob, And nuts on the hob, And a ring-and-thimble cake.Collection: Happy
To make a library It takes two volumes And a fire. Two volumes and a fire, And interest. The interest alone will do If logs are few.Collection: Fire
how could advice be successful? If it turns out right, the adviser is ignored and the advisee takes all the credit. If it proves mistaken, the adviser receives all the blame.Collection: Successful
I have always hated biography, and more especially, autobiography. If biography, the writer invariably finds it necessary to plaster the subject with praises, flattery and adulation and to invest him with all the Christian graces. If autobiography, the same plan is followed, but the writer apologizes for it.Collection: Christian
Almost before the big motor-car stopped, the girl sprang out.Collection: Girl
... ideals, standards, aspirations,--those are chameleon words, and take color from their speakers,--often false tints. A scholarly man of my acquaintance once told me that he traveled a thousand miles into the desert to get away from the word uplift, and it was the first word he heard after he reached his destination.Collection: Uplifting
All through the nineties I met people. Crowds of people. Met and met and met, until it seemed that people were born and hastily grew up, just to be met.Collection: People
I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices.Collection: Fashion
To take pride in a library kills it. Then, its motive power shifts over to the critical if admiring visitor, and apologies are necessary and acceptable and the fat is in the fire.Collection: Apology