There is an unlucky tendency ... to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better.

Some persons' letters seem almost framed to afford a series of alibis for their personality.

What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers.

There is too little courtship in the world.

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.