“What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.”

“Perfection is God; simplicity is perfection. The curse of curses is that men will not let truths like these alone.”

“Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away,but love stays with us. Love is God.”

“I would have had to kill him, and Death, you know, keeps secrets better even than a guilty Roman.”

“The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.”

“Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.”

“I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.”