There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
Art is a delayed echo.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.
To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
