I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.