“In love we often doubt what we most believe.”

We are more often treacherous through weakness than through calculation.

Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too; and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.

We are strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

The heart is forever making the head its fool.

A man’s worth has its season, like fruit.

Taste may change, but inclination never.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

Funeral pomp is more for the vanity of the living than for the honor of the dead.

Perfect Valor is to do, without a witness, all that we could do before the whole world.

The mind is always the patsy of the heart.

The defects and faults of the mind are like wounds in the body; after all imaginable care has been taken to heal them up, still there will be a scar left behind, and they are in continual danger of breaking the skin and bursting out again.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.

It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.

I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they

It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.

Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates.

Some of the things we do are great, but they often have these iterations that are not great. We screw up sometimes. We get rejected.

Often I find that poems predict what I’m going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.