The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.