The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.

What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

The trees reflected in the river -- they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Our Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them unless we were meant to be immortal.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.