I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Those who trust us educate us.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.