A lover of comfort might shrug after looking at the whole apparent jumble of furniture, old paintings, statues with missing arms and legs, engravings that were sometimes bad but precious in memory, and bric-a-brac. Only...

As a young man, he had instinctively husbanded the freshness of his powers. At the time, it was too soon to see that this freshness was giving birth to vivacity and gaiety, and shape to...

The moments of nature’s universal, triumphant silence had come, those minutes when the creative mind works harder, poetic thoughts seethe more ardently, the heart’s passion blazes more brightly and its longing aches more painfully, the...

Memories are either the greatest poetry, when they are memories of a vital happiness, or a burning pain, when they touch dried wounds.p. 479

When all the forces in your organism come into play, then life will begin to play around you as well. You’ll see what your eyes are closed to now, and you’ll hear what you’ve never...

He had never clearly fathomed the true weight of a word of good, truth, and purity cast in the stream of human speech and the deep bend it cut in it. Nor had he thought...

She attended the French performance, but the play’s content now had a connection to her life. She read a book and the book invariably had lines with sparks from her mind, the fire of her...

Life is duty and obligation, therefore love, too, is a duty. It’s as if God sent it to me,’ she said, looking up at the sky, ‘and told me to love.’p. 265

Ah! This is retribution for Promethean fire! Besides being patient, you must also love this sadness and respect your doubts and questions. They are an abundant excess, a luxury of life, and they appear more...

When you don’t know what you’re living for, you don’t care how you live from one day to the next. You’re happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep...