All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.
But the lover’s power is the poet’s power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
But what do we know of the heart nearest to our own? What do we know of our own heart?
Events that are predestined require but little management. They manage themselves. They slip into place while we sleep, and suddenly we are aware that the thing we fear to attempt, is already accomplished.
It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.
It is little men know of women; their smiles and their tears alike are seldom what they seem.
It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it.
Old age is the verdict of life.
That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.
The fate of love is that it always seems too little or too much.
The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.
The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful.
There is no corner too quiet, or too far away, for a woman to make sorrow in it.
This world is run with far too tight a rein for luck to interfere. Fortune sells her wares; she never gives them. In some form or other, we pay for her favors; or we go empty away.
Whatever the scientists may say, if we take the supernatural out of life, we leave only the unnatural.
When men make themselves into brutes it is just to treat them like brutes.
