Style is only the frame to hold your thoughts. It is like the sash of a window; if heavy, it will obscure the light.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.