“You know what love is?It is all kindness, generosity.”

“Without the frown of clouds and lightning, the vines would be burned by the smiling sun.”

“This is not a day for asking questions, not a day on any calendar. This day is conscious of itself. This day is a lover, bread, and gentleness, more manifest than saying can say.”

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. Welcome and entertain them all!”

“From cane reeds, sugar. From a worm's cocoon, silk. Be patient if you can, and from sour grapes will come something sweet.”

“Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace.”

“Spirits are not finely touched But to fine issues.”

“And it is very much lamented,... That you have no such mirrors as will turn Your hidden worthiness into your eye That you might see your shadow.”

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?”

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

“The difference between talent and genius is in the direction of the current: in genius, it is from within outward; in talent from without inward.”

“Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots.”

“Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.”

“In sooth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me, you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn.”

“You know who you are, but know not who you could be.”