“A gloomy guest fits not a wedding feast.”

Most gladly would I give the blood-stained laurel for the first violet which March brings us, the fragrant pledge of the new-fledged year.

Don’t let your heart depend on things That ornament life in a fleeting way! He who possesses, let him learn to lose, He who is fortunate, let him learn pain.

Keep true to the dreams of your youth.

Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.

Measure not by the scale of perfection the meager product of reality.

He cannot complain of a hard sentence, who is made master of his own fate.

I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, through the world’s history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

Time flies on restless pinions – constant never.

To one, science is an exalted goddess; to another it is a cow which provides him with butter.

When the gods were more manlike, Men were more godlike.

To be man’s tender mate was woman born, and in obeying nature she best serves the purposes of heaven.

We can never replace a friend. When a man is fortunate enough to have several, he finds they are all different. No one has a double in friendship.

Against stupidity, God Himself fights in vain.

There is room in the smallest cottage for a happy loving pair.

Honesty prospers in every condition of life.

If you have never seen beauty in a moment of suffering, you have never seen beauty at all. If you have never seen joy in a beautiful face, you have never seen joy at all.

Look. This is your world! You can’t not look. There is no other world. This is your world; it is your feast. You inherited this; you inherited these eyeballs; you inherited this world of color. Look at the greatness of the whole thing. Look! Don’t hesitate – look! Open your eyes. Don’t blink, and look, look – look further.

Life should serve up its feast of experience in a series of courses.

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy.

People go through life blindly, ignoring death like revellers at a party feasting on fine foods. They ignore that later they will have to go to the toilet, so they do not bother to find out where there is one.

Feast today makes fast tomorrow.

Where are the feasts we were promised? Where is the wine, the new wine, dying on the vine.

When Christ at Cana’s feast by pow’r divine, Inspir’d cold water, with the warmth of wine, See! cry’d they while, in red’ning tide, it gush’d, The bashful stream hath seen its God and blush’d.

No fool can be silent at a feast.