“Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.”

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism.

We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

The breaking wave and the muscle as it contracts obey the same law. Delicate line gathers the body’s total strength in a bold balance. Shall my soul meet so severe a curve, journeying on its way to form?

The bird building her home on your windowsill has every nest destroyed before. The spider that is delicately weaving a masterpiece has had every single thread broken before. And despite it all, they try again.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

She leads us through their unknown world, her gift of language rising up like a delicate string of necessary lights.

To joke in the face of danger is the supreme politeness, a delicate refusal to cast oneself as a tragic hero.

Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.

When a dream is born in you With a sudden clamorous pain, When you know the dream is true And lovely, with no flaw nor stain, O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch You’ll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.