Little by little, even with other cares, the slowly but surely working poison of the garden-mania begins to stir in my long-sluggish veins.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

My idea is this, that when you only love a little you're naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so that it doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper and intenser way, then you're in the very same proportion jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.

Excellence does not require perfection.

I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.