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

I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.

Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.