“A still small voice spake unto me, ‘Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?”

Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, but women, worst and best, as Heaven and Hell.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

Love is the only gold.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, for those that were here we see no more.

Ah, when shall all men’s good Be each man’s rule, and universal peace Lie like a shaft of light across the land, And like a lane of beams athwart the sea, Thro’ all the circle of the golden year?

For love reflects the thing beloved.

Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die.

What the sunshine is to the flower, the Lord Jesus Christ is to my soul.

And the days darken round me, and the years, Among new men, strange faces, other minds.

There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass.

I can’t be anonymous by reason of your confounded photographs. (To Julia Margaret Cameron)

A beam in darkness: let it grow.

So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be.

Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is just to do or die.

The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters – because we never know which things might.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Life is earnest, art is gay.

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one’s own human failing.

We don’t all dig Shakespeare uniformly, or even ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ The understanding of art depends finally upon one’s willingness to extend one’s humanity and one’s knowledge of human life.