Fine phrases I value more than bank-notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony of words. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpse of its features it disappears.

The only thing a man knows is himself.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.