“Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.”

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

It was still early, and the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Many have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

She moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.

The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.