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

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.

You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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.