... I am dark but fair, / Black but fair.

We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights.

Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple - leaves with an early moon.

If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.

The sense of humor has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.

Assuredly it would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.

My day-mind can endure / Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. / But O, afraid, unsure, / My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.

A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it further back -- it is already so far.

I come from nothing: but from where come the undying thoughts I bear?

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, / Unseen, this colorless sky of folded showers, / And folded winds...

To know how to put what knowledge in which place is wisdom (hikmah). Otherwise, knowledge without order and seeking it without discipline does lead to confusion and hence to injustice to one's self.

You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.

How can a parliamentarian or a leader in a country say, on the one hand, that we're going to support Greece but at the same time say that Greeks are lazy?

Fiction has to be plausible. All history has to do is happen.

Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly; eventually you land on all the properties.

Never refer to your wedding night as the original amateur hour.

I can't let things go when it comes to stop painting. It has to be my way.

A land ethic for tomorrow should...stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly.

I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket player than the best prose writer.