My Small Boat

We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

Although to penetrate into the intimate mysteries of nature and thence to learn the true causes of phenomena is not allowed to us, nevertheless it can happen that a certain fictive hypothesis may suffice for explaining many phenomena.

It is not enough to be a good player, you must also play well.

Until you’ve lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.

“Heaven” - is what I cannot reach!
“Heaven” - is what I cannot reach!
The Apple on the Tree -
Provided it do hopeless - hang -
That - “Heaven” is - to Me!
The Color, on the Cruising Cloud -
The interdicted Land -
Behind the Hill - the House behind -
There - Paradise - is found!
Her teasing […]

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more […]

The People of Spain Think Cervantes
The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

It is better to wear out than to rust out.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.