“Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.”

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

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.