“Life is one long process of getting tired.”

“All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep.”

“Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”

“If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”

“Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds”

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime”

“[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.”