Cynicism is a sure sign of youth.

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.

I haven't much opinion of words. They're apt to set fire to a dry tongue, that's what I say.

Youth is the period of harsh judgments, and a man seldom learns until he reaches thirty that human nature is made up not of simples, but of compounds.

A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.

No one in the modern world is more lonely than the writer with a literary conscience.

There is a terrible loneliness in the spring.