There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.
All wines are by their very nature full of reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.
All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal.
Celestial spirit that doth roll; The heart’s sepulchral stone away, Be this our resurrection day, The singing Easter of the soul – O gentle Master of the Wise, Teach us to say: “I will arise.”
A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.
Though actually the work of man’s hands – or, more properly speaking, the work of his travelling feet, – roads have long since come to seem so much a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the landscape no less natural than rocks and trees.
We have, of course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal affairs of man.
How much more interesting life would be if only more people had the courage and skill to act themselves, instead of abjectly understudying some one else!
Time’s horses gallop down the lessening hill.
The road recedes as the traveler advances, leaving a continuous present.
You can’t fake it. Bad writing is a gift.
We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.
Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.
Wild oats will get sown some time, and one of the arts of life is to sow them at the right time.
We also maintain – again with perfect truth – that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.
Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another.
Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.
More and more the world is growing to love a lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions.
It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living.
Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world.
The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct.