And where was happiness if it sprung not from the soil? Where contentment if it dwelt not near to Nature?

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

It seems to me that this is the true test for poetry: - that it should go beneath experience, as prose can never do, and awaken an apprehension of things we have never, and can never, know in the actuality.

Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.