“We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.”

Presenting literature as an extension of human acquaintance and experience · Treatise, Notes towards the Definition of Culture

• Art
• Friendship

“It will never leave me while I live. He is so near me often …”

Expressing the enduring presence of her son Harry three years after his death · Letter to Mrs Kappey, August 1919

• Family
• Grief
• Memory

“Give a man five years, and, with unfortunate exceptions of course, he will find his level on the Pacific, and his place, whether high or low, as naturally as a stream of water.”

Sees the West as a force that sorts character without ceremony · Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History

• America
• Character
• Place

“I must begin by asking your forgiveness where I touch on matters of which you know much more than I.”

Beginning a discussion of travel with characteristic modesty about his own expertise. · Speech, Some Aspects of Travel, 1914

• Experience
• Humility
• Travel

“The movement of Heine's rhythms, simple as they seem, is not spontaneous; it is an effect of art: the poet laboured at his cadences as at his meanings.”

Revealing the disciplined craft beneath an appearance of effortless music · Essay, Heine

• Art
• Music
• Poetry

“I have always found original genius of a concentrated and peculiar kind the most dangerous endowment.”

Treating intense originality as a gift that can also imperil balance · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter I

• Art
• Truth

“I am an inveterate lazybones.”

A self-deprecating glimpse of Holmes's characteristic humour about his own habits · Letter to Phineas Barnes, May 8, 1830

• Character
• Humour
• Work

“The Negro woman is the most neglected woman in the world.”

A forceful observation on the racial and gendered marginalisation of Black women · Essay

• Truth
• War

“Curiosity is the thirst of the soul; it inflames and torments us, and makes us taste every thing with joy, however otherwise insipid, by which it may be quenched.”

Describing curiosity as both hunger and pleasure · Rambler No. 103

• Joy
• Knowledge

“It is a sorrowful thing to think of, that the United States has never kept one treaty made with the Indians.”

A forceful indictment of broken promises and historical injustice · A Century of Dishonor

• Truth
• War

“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Arguing that poetry provides essential knowledge and nourishment unavailable elsewhere · Essay, The Wedge

• Knowledge
• Necessity
• Poetry

“It is impossible to be much alone during illness, without thinking often of all that is hidden from us by the veil of life.”

Connecting solitude and physical frailty with thoughts of the unseen and eternal · Letter fragment, familiar correspondence

• Faith
• Mortality
• Solitude

“It is not enough to have talent. More is needed to become intelligent: one must live amid significant circumstances and see the forces of one's time at work.”

Original: Es ist nicht genug, daß man Talent habe. Es gehört mehr dazu, um gescheit zu werden. Man muß auch in großen Verhältnissen leben und Gelegenheit haben, den spielenden Figuren der Zeit in die Karten zu sehen und selber zu Gewinn und Verlust mitzuspielen. — Talent develops through experience of the wider world and active participation in its affairs. · Conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann (German)

• Experience
• Learning
• Talent

“We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.”

Self-love as the root of perceived ingratitude · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

• Ingratitude
• Love
• Self

“A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.”

A wry reflection on how timing can make unwelcome realism seem like pessimism; the attribution is commonly reported but the original source is unclear. · Quotation attributed to Owen Seaman

• Pessimism
• Timing
• Truth

“Entire happiness is not attainable either by this or by any other method.”

Rejecting promises that any single pursuit can provide complete happiness · Introductory Lecture, University College London, 1892

• Happiness
• Life
• Wisdom

“Writing, without something urgently requiring to be said, ends in imitation, restoration, selection.”

Arguing that genuine writing begins with something that demands expression · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XII

• Art
• Truth

“My good friends in Albemarle Street talk of their yachts, don’t want my advice about them, are good enough to let me listen, and I come away refreshed by their conversation.”

Valuing company in which he could simply listen rather than perform as a literary celebrity · Conversation with T. Edgar Pemberton

• Art
• Friendship

“As poetry is the expression of the heart of man, so it reflects this change to its smallest particle.”

Seeing poetry as an exceptionally sensitive record of changing human thought · Preface, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry

• Poetry
• Time

“I hope that each and every one of you will find one person in the world before you die who can live with you and count you a blessing.”

A warm wish for the rare blessing of a deeply accepting relationship. · Speech, The Classics and the Sciences, 1923

• Companionship
• Life
• Love

“The standardized curricular education requires results each day, each week, surely each month, with an accumulated measurable outcome at the end of each semester; creative education thinks in terms of years and even in spans of years.”

Measuring growth slowly rather than by weekly yield · Book, Creative Power

• Creativity
• Education
• Time

“A person discovers the truth of things only by testing them in action.”

Original: Den Menschen erkennt man nur am Tun. — Character and conviction become meaningful when expressed through conduct rather than words. · Maxims and Reflections (German)

• Action
• Character
• Truth

“What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament!”

Joyce’s deliberately outrageous dismissal of Italian art is characteristic of his polemical humour. · Letter concerning Italian art

• Art
• Culture
• Humour

“I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least I do not know.”

Expressing her deep affection for the character Elizabeth Bennet · Letter to Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813

• Character
• Humour
• Writing