"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau (Walden and Other Writings)

"Simplify, simplify."
— Henry David Thoreau

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all."
— Emily Dickinson

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."
— Emily Dickinson

"I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!"
— Emily Dickinson

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
— Emily Dickinson

"A word is dead when it's been said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
— Emily Dickinson

"The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS."
— Emily Dickinson

"Truth is so rare, it is delightful to tell it."
— Emily Dickinson

"Beauty is not caused. It is."
— Emily Dickinson

"We never know how high we are till we are called to rise. Then if we are true to form our statures touch the skies."
— Emily Dickinson (Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson)

"Forever is composed of nows."
— Emily Dickinson

"Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency."
— Emily Dickinson

"Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it."
— Emily Dickinson

"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)

"Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them."
— William Shakespeare (Twelfth Night)

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
— William Shakespeare

"You speak an infinite deal of nothing."
— William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

"Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
— William Shakespeare

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring barque,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."
— William Shakespeare (Great Sonnets)

"We know what we are, but not what we may be."
— William Shakespeare

"Brevity is the Soul of wit."
— William Shakespeare

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"The mind is its own place, and in itself
can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv'st/Live well, how long or short permit to heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way."
— John Milton

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"What are men to rocks and mountains?"
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other."
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"What strange creatures brothers are!"
— Jane Austen

"Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way."
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"Life seems nothing more than a quick succession of busy nothings."
— Jane Austen

"A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
— Jane Austen

"Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!"
— Jane Austen (Mansfield Park)

"Perhaps it it our imperfections that make us so perfect for one another!"
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"Better be without sense than misapply it as you do. "
— Jane Austen (Emma)

"I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve."
— Jane Austen

""It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.""
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)