“I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.”

If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.

The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

Moonlight is sculpture.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

What pen can describe this scene of marvellous horror; what pencil can portray it?

Corporate types love to pretend their life is exciting. The whispers, fist-pumping and animated hand gestures are all designed to lift our job description from what it really is – that of an overpaid clerk.

Corporate types love to pretend their life is exciting. The whispers, fist-pumping and animated hand gestures are all designed to lift our job description from what it really is – that of an overpaid clerk.

I can’t please everyone. That’s not in my J.D., you know, not in my job description.

The artist is not a man who describes, but a man who feels.

You are a genius beyond description, so start telling yourself that and become aware of who you really are.

Writing a description for this thing for general audiences is bloody hard. There’s nothing to relate it to.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.