After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.
The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person.
There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.
The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made up of the same elements?
The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.
Speak the affirmative; emphasize your choice by utter ignoring of all that you reject.
Within, I do not find wrinkles and used heart, but unspent youth.
We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves.
The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.
A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree.
The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.
A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.
Poetry makes its own pertinence, and a single stanza outweighs a book of prose.
The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.
When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
We are not free to use today, or to promise tomorrow, because we are already mortgaged to yesterday.
Always pay; for first or last you must pay your entire debt.
People who know how to act are never preachers.
The instinct of the people is right.