My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.

Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.