The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

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

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.