The wild vicissitudes of taste.

How soon will some few years pass away, and then when the day is ended, and this life's lease expired, what have men of the world's glory, but dreams and thoughts? O happy soul for evermore, who can rightly compare this life with that long-lasting life to come, and can balance the weighty glory of the one with the light golden vanity of the other.

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion and confirms the decisions of nature.

The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

It's a town you come to for a short time.

To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. It's smell and it's color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once moreYe myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.