... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.

I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.

It's never too late to be who you were meant to be.

One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.

What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.