To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.