1. “A face that had a story to tell. How different faces are in this particular! Some of them speak not. They are books in which not a line is written, save perhaps a date.”
2. “A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.”
3. “Age is opportunity no less,
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”
4. “Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.”
5. “Alas! it not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of human passion with, from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.”
6. “All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.”
7. “All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal.”
8. “All the means of action--
The shapeless masses, the materials--
Lie everywhere about us. That we need
Is the celestial fire to change the flint
Into transparent crystal, bright and clear.
That fire is genius!”
9. “All things must change to something new, to something strange.”
10. “And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like Arabs,
And silently steal away.”
11. “Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And out hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.”
12. “Art is power.”
13. “Art is the child of nature; yes,
Her darling child in whom we trace
The features of the mother's face,
Her aspect and her attitude.”
14. “As I gaze upon the sea! All the old romantic legends, all my dreams, come back to me.”
15. “A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.”
16. "Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not -- and often times we call a man cold, when he is only sad."
17. “Books are sepulchres of thought.”
18. “Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.”
19. “Dead he is not, but departed,--for the artist never dies.”
20. “Evil is only good perverted.”
21. “Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.”
22. “Feeling is deep and still; and the word that floats on the surface
Is as the tossing buoy, that betrays where the anchor is hidden.”
23. “For there are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion,
That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble,
Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,
Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.”
24. “For next to being a great poet is the power of understanding one.”
25. “Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think.”
26. “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.”
27. “He spoke well who said that graves are the footprints of angels.”
28. “How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and the heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!”
29. “How can I tell the signals and the signs
By which one heart another heart divines?
How can I tell the many thousand ways
By which it keeps the secret it betrays?”
30. “I am the Angel of the Sun
Whose flaming wheels began to run
When God 's almighty breath
Said to the darkness and the Night,
Let there be light! and there was light.”
31. “I dislike an eye that twinkles like a star. Those only are beautiful which, like the planets, have a steady, lambent light,--are luminous, but not sparking.”
32. “I do not love thee for what is done,
And cannot be undone. Thy very weakness
Hath brought thee nearer to me, and henceforth
My love will have a sense of pity in it,
Making it less a worship than before.”
33. “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
34. "If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth."
35. “Into each life some rain must fall, some days be dark and dreary.”
36. “Is this is a dream? O, if it be a dream,
Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet!”
37. “It is a beautiful trait in the lovers character, that they think no evil of the object loved.”
38. “It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves.”
39. “It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.”
40. “It is the heart and not the brain
That to the highest doth attain.”
41. “It takes less time to do a thing right than it does to explain why you did it wrong.”
42. “Let us then, be up and doing.
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.”
43. “Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”
44. “Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.”
45. “Love is sunshine, hate is shadow,
Life is checkered shade and sunshine.”
46. “Music is the universal language of mankind.”
47. “Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings -- as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.”
48. “Nature is a revelation of God;
Art a revelation of man.”
49. “One half the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream.”
50. “Scarce knowing if we wish to go to stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.”
51. "Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence."
52. “Silently one by one,
in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars,
the forget-me-nots of the angels.”
53. "Sit and daydream, and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind."
54. “Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.”
55. “So I wander and wander along,
And forever before me gleams
The shining city of song,
In the beautiful land of dreams.
But when I would enter the gate
Of that golden atmosphere,
It is gone, and I wonder and wait
For the vision to reappear.”
56. “So many ghosts, and forms of fright,
Have started from their graves to-night,
They have driven sleep from mine eyes away;
I will go down to the chapel and pray.”
57. “Something the heart must have to cherish,
Must love, and joy, and sorrow learn;
Something with passion clasp, or perish,
And in itself to ashes burn.”
58. “Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.”
59. “Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!”
60. "That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain."
61. “The bards sublime,
Whose footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.”
62. “The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.”
63. “The counterfeit and counterpart
Of nature reproduced in art.”
64. “The dawn is not distant, nor is the night starless; love is eternal.”
65. “The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.”
66. “The divine insanity of noble minds, that never falters nor abates, but labors, endures, and waits, till all that it foresees it finds, or what it cannot find, creates.”
67. “The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.”
68. “The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”
69. “The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart.”
70. “The leaves of memory seemed to make
A mournful rustling in the dark.”
71. “The light upon her face
Shines from the windows of another world.
Saints only have such faces.”
72. "The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books."
73. “The pleasant books, that silently among
Our household treasures take familiar places,
And are to us as if a living tongue
Spake from the printed leaves or pictured faces!”
74. "There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love - the first fluttering of its silken wings - the first rising sound and breath of that wind which is so soon to sweep through the soul, to purify or to destroy."
75. “These faces in the mirrors
Are but the shadows and phantoms of myself.”
76. “The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone, shadows of the evening fall around us, and the world seems but a dim reflection itself -- a broader shadow. We look forward into the coming lonely night; the soul withdraws itself. Then stars arise, and the night is wholly.”
77. “The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.”
78. ”This life of ours is a wild aeolian harp of many a joyous strain,
But under them al there runs a loud perpetual wail, as of souls in pain.”
79. “Thou driftest gently down the tides of sleep.”
80. “Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.”
81. “Torrent of light and river of air,
Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen,
Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!”
82. “Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!”
83. “'Twas but a dream,--let it pass,--let it vanish like so many others!
What I thought was a flower is only a weed, and is worthless.”
84. “Well has it been said that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak.”
85. “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”
86. ”Were half the power that fills the world with terror,
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts,
Given to redeem the human mind from error,
There were no need of arsenals and forts.”
87. “We see but dimly through the mists and vapors;
Amid these earthly damps
What seem to us but sad, funeral tapers
May be heaven's distant lamps.”
88. “What is time? The shadow on the dial, the striking of the clock, the running of the sand, day and night, summer and winter, months, years, centuries -- these are but arbitrary and outward signs, the measure of Time, not Time itself. Time is the Life of the soul.”
89. “When one is truly in love, one not only says it, but shows it.”
90. “Writ in the climate of heaven, in the language spoken by angels.”
