In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.