Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped - to reach it.

I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don’t know exactly why I didn’t.

For any sustained and more or less original work it seems most necessary that one should have the quietude and strength of Nature at hand, like a great reservoir from which to draw. The open air, and the physical and mental health that goes with it, the sense of space and freedom of the Sky, the vitality and amplitude of the Earth – these are real things from which one can only cut oneself off at serious peril and risk to one’s immortal soul.

It would seem probable that the attachment of such a one is of a tender and profound character; indeed, it is possible that in this class of men we have the love sentiment in one of its most perfect forms – a form in which from the necessities of the situation the sensuous element, though present, is exquisitely subordinated to the spiritual.

The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau’s Walden.

IT is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall – which was, and is, before all a Law College – and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.

So that eternal love, in love’s fresh case, Weighs not the dust and injury of age;.

Making a choice is like backing a horse – in a hundred years, they may decide you picked wrongly.

Motherhood is, after all, woman’s great and incomparable work.

Let your mind be quiet, realizing the beauty of the world, and the immense boundless treasures that it holds.