... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.

You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

...Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't.

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