Surprise is the secret of joy.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when Joy is the fundamental thing in him, and Grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.