“It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.”

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!

Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

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.