Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.
Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.
Since hate poisons the soul, don’t cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.
Sing a song of seasons; something bright in all, flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.
It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.
I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
There is but one art, to omit.
Do not forget that even as “to work is to worship” so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.
When the grass was closely mown, Walking on the lawn alone, In the turf a hole I found, And hid a soldier underground. Spring and daisies came apace; Grasses hide my hiding place; Grasses run like a green sea O’er the lawn up to my knee.
An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.
Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.
Away with funeral music-set The pipe to powerful lips- The cup of life’s for him that drinks And not for him that sips.
The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.