One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

Where there is no love there is no understanding.

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.

Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

Wordsworth went to the Lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.