If you would keep your soul From spotted sight or sound, Live like the velvet mole; Go burrow underground.

In masks outrageous and austere The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile.

When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird's beak, We shall live well--we shall live very well.

I am better able to imagine hell than heaven; it is my inheritance, I suppose.

My lord, adjudge my strength, and set me where I bear a little more than I can bear.

Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter's over.

I shall lie folded like a saint, Lapped in a scented linen sheet, On a bedstead striped with bright-blue paint, Narrow and cold and neat.

If any have a stone to throw It is not I, ever or now.

I bear a little more than I can bear.

Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There's something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.

An old earthen pipe like myself is dry and thirsty and so a most voracious drinker of life at its source; I'm no more to be split by the vital stream than if I were stone or steel.

You'll never find a rainbow if you're looking down

They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.

People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined to.

I have to say I'm very good on a bike. Maybe the last time I was 5 years old.

Eschew wicked company and associate with saintly persons. Acquire virtue day and night, and always meditate on that which is eternal forgetting that which is temporary.

If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.

You subscribe politics to it. I subscribe freedom to it.

The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

I think understanding or comprehension is probably the strongest emotion that you feel, or at least some kind of empathy.

Beside each believer stands an Angel as protector and shepherd, leading him to life.