Affection and sympathy for flowers is almost exclusively a nature lover’s trait. Never think of anything until you have first asked yourself if there is an absolute necessity for doing it, at that particular moment. Thinking of things, when things need not be thought of, is offering an opportunity to Worry; and Worry is the favorite agent of Death when the destroyer handles his work in a lingering way, and achieves premature results.

Never look back, and never look forward, as long as you can possibly help it. Looking back leads the way to sorrow. And looking forward ends in the cruelest of all delusions: it encourages hope. The present time is the precious time. Live for the passing day: the passing day is all that we can be sure of.

Your mind sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall awaken it. You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristing not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base.

However, I tell you—you will come some day to a craggy pass of the channel, where the whole of life’s stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master wave into a calmer current.

It is one of my rules in life never to notice what I do not understand. Life is like plumcakes. In some the plums are all on the top, and we eat them gaily, till we suddenly find they are gone. In others the plums sink to the bottom, and we look for them in vain as we go on, and often comes to them when it is too late to enjoy them. However, in the well-made cake, the plums are wisely scattered all through, and every mouthful is a pleasure. We make our own cakes, in a great measure.

There is a class of spectators whose sympathy will help them to see the perfect through a mist of imperfections. Nobody ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.

Their highest merit is suggestiveness. There is reason to suspect that people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life becomes fascinating either in the poet’s imagination or the painter’s eye.

It is an age so full of light, that there is scarce a country or corner of Europe, whose beams are not crossed and interchanged with others. Many of us would read in the stars, if we could, something hidden from us; but of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence—and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered. Every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it.

Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. In natural science there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the observation of human life.

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into still subtler form. Favorable circumstances—good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly adhered to—keep the World out of Bedlam. However, let the World fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam its safest abode? The play of imagination, in the romance of early youth, is rarely interrupted with scruples of probability.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire. Many people have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:–reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream.