“It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.”

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere to the subtle, contriving head.

They… who await. No gifts from Chance, have conquered Fate.

Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the knowledge of nature is interesting to all men.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.

I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.

It is – last stage of all When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man

It is the inalienable right of all to be happy.

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure – such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

In every human Beast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.

Whatever a person may be like, we must still love them because we love God.

But the devil is a subtle worm; he does not give up at one defeat, for he knows human nature, and the strength of the forces which battle for him.

I know I could never forgive myself if I elected to live without humane purpose, without trying to help the poor and unfortunate, without recognizing that perhaps the purest joy in life comes with trying to help others.

Even a wolf knows how to be polite when animalistic humans have no clue about politeness.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.