How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence. As Ruskin wrote in his earlier and better days, "No weight nor mass nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought.