"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."

"The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication."

"The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings."

"The Bible is literature, not dogma."

"Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure."

"Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end."

"The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age."

"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."

"It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to."

"Oaths are the fossils of piety."

"A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world."

"Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled."

"A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world."

"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."

"My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests."

"Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character."

"Habit is stronger than reason."

"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool."

"Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired."

"For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned."

"The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality."

"With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me."

"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."

"An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there."

"The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be."

"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."

"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions."

"The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients."

"It is wisdom to believe the heart."

"I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism."

"The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity."

"Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts."

"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."

"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."

"Art is a delayed echo."

"Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny."

"Wisdom comes by disillusionment."

"Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles."

"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."

"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator."

"Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them."

"The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy."

"Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself."

"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired."

"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better."

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."

"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."

"The earth has its music for those who will listen."

"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy."

"Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament."