To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.

After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

... in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.

Consequences are unpitying.

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.