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

It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one's soul.

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

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

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.

Like a human being, the mountain is a composite creature, only to be known after many a view from many a different point, and repaying this loving study, if it is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of personality, an increase of significance.

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.