Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.

My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

In England it is enough for a man to try and produce any serious, beautiful work to lose all his rights as a citizen.