“It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”

To be loved to madness–such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.