Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it’s hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.
It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.
In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.
Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with the stars to see, Bread I dip in the river There’s the life for a man like me, There’s the life for ever.
When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!
Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl.
I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.
The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all.
Courage, the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.
Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.
We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.
My idea of man’s chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.
There is nothing but God’s grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe.
Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.
Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother’s corpse.
To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.