My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.

Things refuse to be mismanaged for long.

Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself,-must go over the whole ground. What it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know.

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

The dearest events are summer-rain.

Research is not seeing what others do not see, it is seeing the same thing as other people and thinking what they do not.