“The wealth that cannot be administered is a burden.”

“A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state.”

“All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.”

“It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.”

“As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness.”

“The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”

“And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.”

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”

“The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear.”

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.”

“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.”

“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.”