Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age--the only perfectly beautiful things on earth--joyous, innocent, half divine--useless, say they who are wiser than God.

I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

A pipe is a pocket philosopher,--a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

It needs a great nature to bear the weight of a great gratitude.

It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.

The scorn of genius is the most arrogant and the most boundless of all scorn.

Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!