“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

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

“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

“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.”