We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

An echo of music, a face in the street, the wafer of the new moon, a wanton thought - only in the iridescence of things the vagabond soul is happy.

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

How can they say my life is not a success? Have I not for more than sixty years got enough to eat and escaped being eaten?

How awful to reflect that what people say of us is true!