Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.
Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother.
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change – only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.
He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people’s opinions and feelings concerning himself...
The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world’s resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.
Teach love, for that is what you are.
We are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us.
The tread Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause, And hears them never pause, but pass and die.
Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
Music sweeps by me as a messenger – Carrying a message that is not for me.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.
This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry’s got a finger in it.
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.