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

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

“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?”

“We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.”

“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 can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”

“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”