A volunteer, you assign yourself specific roles and risks according to your judgement of their brilliance and importance, and you see when life itself may be justifiably devoted to them.

I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject.

One should be ever booted and spurred and ready to depart.

Fame and tranquility can never be bedfellows.

I have here only made a nosegay of culled flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the thread that tied them together.

No pleasure is fully delightful without communications, and no delight absolute except imparted.

The common notions that we find in credit around us and infused into our souls by our fathers' seed, these seem to be the universal and natural ones. Whence it comes to pass that what is off the hinges of custom, people believe to be off the hinges of reason.