“The Moon for all her light and graceHas never learned to know her place.”

“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”

“I dwell in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago.”

“As it is more blessed to receive, so it must be more blessed to receive than to give back.”

“The old dog barks backward without getting up I can remember when he was a pup.”

“"Fair, kind, and true" is all my argument,"Fair, kind, and true" varying to other words;And in this change is my invention spent,Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.”

“Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate... When in eternal lines to time thou growst So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

“The truest poetry is the most feigning.”

“I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.”

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.”

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.”

“The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.”

“You can accomplish a hundred other things but if you do not accomplish the one thing for which you have been sent, it will be as if you have done nothing.”

“I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.”

“The soul of this man is his clothes.”

“Let me be that I am and seek not to alter me.”

“If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do my liking. In the meantime, let me be that I am, and seek not toalter me.”

“Each man has an aptitude born with him. Do your work.”

“Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.”

“Working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation.”