“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

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.