“Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.”

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

This strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims.

Nature’s great law, and the law of all men’s minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.

The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!

Prayer cannot bring water to parched fields, or mend a broken bridge, or rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.

When an unbaked pot is broken, the potter can use the mud to make a new one; but when a baked one is broken, he cannot do the same any longer

Remember: Life is short, break the rules (they were made to be broken) Forgive quickly, kiss slowly Love truly, laugh uncontrollably And never regret anything that makes you smile.

Even when muddy your wings sparkle bright wonders that heal broken worlds.

I turn to right and left, in all the earth I see no signs of justice, sense or worth: A man does evil deeds, and all his days Are filled with luck and universal praise; Another’s good in all he does – he dies A wretched, broken man whom all despise.

The word ‘survivor’ carries a weight of remembrance that has broken the minds and bodies of more than a few men and women.

Oh what a wonderful soul so bright inside you. Got power to heal the sun’s broken heart, power to restore the moon’s vision too.

I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.