“A woman's beauty is one of her great missions.”

Affirming beauty as an active and purposeful gift · Prose Fancies

• Beauty
• Purpose
• Women

“Youth, however, can afford to enjoy even its melancholy; for the ultimate fact of which that melancholy is a prophecy is a long way off.”

On the privilege of youth to feel sorrow without its full weight · Essay or prose fancy

• Melancholy
• Time
• Youth

“A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.”

Advocating detachment from others' opinions as a path to clarity · Essay or prose fancy

• Detachment
• Self
• Wisdom

“Wild oats will get sown some time, and one of the arts of life is to sow them at the right time.”

On the wisdom of timing youthful folly rather than suppressing it · Essay or prose fancy

• Life
• Wisdom
• Youth

“Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.”

A sharp critique of institutional religion versus original ideals · Essay, The Religion of a Literary Man

• Criticism
• Idealism
• Religion

“A paradox is a truth standing on its head in order to attract attention.”

Defining the playful yet serious function of paradox in thought and speech · Lecture or conversation (as commonly reported)

• Ideas
• Truth
• Wit

“Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road.”

On nature's cyclical presence and the quiet promise held in every parting · Essay, Vanishing Roads and Other Essays

• Change
• Hope
• Nature