“What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.”

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

Those who trust us educate us.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past-sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.