“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”

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.

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

Generosity is the flower of justice.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

Happiness is like a butterfly.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.

What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

The trees reflected in the river – they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.