“We can only begin to live when we conceive life asTragedy.”

“Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.”

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

“What do we know but that we face one another in this place?”

“We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”