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

The fire of true enthusiasm is like the fires of Baku, which no water can ever quench, and which burn steadily on from night to day, and year to year, because their well-spring is eternal.

There is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery.

I have known men who have been sold and bought a hundred times, who have only got very fat and very comfortable in the process of exchange.

Friendship is usually treated...as a tough...thing which will survive all manner of bad treatment. But this is an exceedingly great and foolish error; it may die in an hour of a single unwise word.

Fancy tortures more people than does reality

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.