As we to the brutes, poets are to us.

The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures.

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.

Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.

Caricature is rough truth.

Lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.

We are betrayed by what is false within

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?

. . . Most falls aren't free -- there is always the tension, it seems to me, between what you are falling from and what you are falling to.

There is a sad disconnectedness that overcomes a library when its owner is gone.

Sometimes only a change of viewpoint is needed to convert a tiresome duty into an interesting opportunity.

To have a style is to be stuck.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

Religions are not imaginative, not poetic, not soulful. On the contrary, they are parochial, small-minded, niggardly with the human imagination, precisely where science is generous.

The more pictures you see, the better you are as a photographer.

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

Whatever impresses you attracts you. Whatever you pursue becomes your purpose.