For myself I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
As we get older, we realise that the rarest courage is that of thinking.
For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?
All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.
What the inner voice says Will not disappoint the hoping soul.
Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing.
Man is so made that when anything fires his soul, impossibilities vanish.
The poet consecrates himself to and consumes himself in the task of defining and constructing a language within the language.
For the paths of night and day are near to each other.
My way of joking is telling the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
There is no man more complete than the one who travelled a lot, who changed the shape of his thoughts and his life twenty times.
When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.
The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.
Stones are hollowed out by the constant dropping of water.
No one can answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
Our thoughts are free.
What Nature is to the mind she is also to the body.
A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
He who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.
What one refuses in a minute No eternity will return.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
I have invariably found that, all else failing, a man's character can be deduced from nothing so surely as from a jest that he takes in bad part.
Light griefs are loquacious, but the great are dumb.
You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.
One cannot prevent people from thinking what they please.
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