So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

But I, in the chilling twilight stand and wait At the portcullis, at thy castle gate, Longing to see the charmed door of dreams Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!

What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.

You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.

Life is about pursuing the essence of creation

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

Ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough: Man meets woman, and they fall in love, But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough. You got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

You can't shelter it. You can't hide it. You have to let people know what you're going through, what you're feeling, what you think you have that's a problem.

Allow the inherent emptiness within what you are about to do direct you.

Of all things, none does not revere the Way and honor virtue. Reverence of the Way and honoring virtue were not demanded of them, but it is in their nature.

Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.

I've been promoted to middle management. I never thought I'd sink so low.