How can I teach your children gentleness and mercy to the weak, and reverence for life, which in its nakedness and excess, is still a gleam of God's omnipotence, when by your laws, your actions and your speech, you contradict the very things I teach?

The holiest of holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart.

If we love one another, nothing, in truth, can harm us, whatever mischances may happen.

Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose.

The story, from beginning to end, I found again in a heart of a friend.

Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act -- act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead.

Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book they buy with it the right to abuse the author.