“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?”

“why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.”

“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.”

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

“When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?”

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”