I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another

trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.