History repeats itself.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.

But certain winds will make men's temper bad.

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.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.