We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.

The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen.

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.

Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.