I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils haricots - those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridites calling themselves human food!

Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self compassion.

The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm.

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .

Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others-the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.

How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.

To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.