“It is the true season of love when we know that we alone can love, that no one could ever have loved before us, and that no one will ever love in the same way after us.
“I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way, by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else....I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road
“Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do
“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance
“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish