If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

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.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.