“There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.”

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.

I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts or my thoughts the result of my dreams.

There’s lots of good fish in the sea, maybe, but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.

Man is a mistake. He must go.

Used to all kinds of society, she watched people as one reads the pages of a novel, with a certain disinterested amusement.

Be sure your sins will find you out, especially if you’re married and her name’s Bertha.

That’s how women are with me said Paul. They want me like mad but they don’t want to belong to me.

Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.

You love me so much, you want to put me in your pocket. And there I will die smothered.

Now go away then, and leave me alone. I don’t want any more of your meretricious persiflage.

They stood together in a false intimacy, a nervous contact. And he was in love with her.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.

Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos.

Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

One sheds ones sickness in books- repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them.

How many perils doe enfold The righteous man to make him daily fall.

As one sits here in summertime and listens to the cuckoo and all the other bird songs, the crackling and buzzing of insects, as one gazes at the shining colors of flowers, doth one become dumbstruck before the Kingdom of the Creator.

I knew I held strength when in the darkest, coldest corner of my mind I managed to make flowers grow.

No dainty flower or herbs that grows on ground, No arborett with painted blossoms drest And smelling sweet, but there it might be found To bud out fair, and throw her sweet smells all around.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

Experiments upon vegetation give reason to believe that light combines with certain parts of vegetables, and that the green of their leaves, and the various colors of flowers, is chiefly owing to this combination.

The snowdrop and primrose our woodlands adorn, and violets bathe in the wet o’ the morn.

So passeth, in the passing of a day, Of mortal life the leaf, the bud, the flower.