“I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.”

It was the special purpose of Christ’s appearance upon earth to bring immortality to light.

Be a great speaker, become a leader.

Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, till not a slave shall on this earth be found.

Thus situated, the perilous experiment must be made. Let me make it with full deliberations, and be prepared for the consequences.

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.

Virtue is not always amiable.

No man is entirely free from weakness and imperfection in this life.

We understand now, we’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.

If the fundamental principles in the Declaration of Independence, as self-evident truths, are real truths, the existence of slavery, in any form, is a wrong.

A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.

Go on and improve in everything worthy.

To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.

Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak, and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.

If conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.

Your presence is poetic, mysterious and deep. If you don’t mind I’d like to read you; uncover the dirty secrets hidden within your pages and fill that missing space between your sheets.

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.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

Maybe I hold onto pain because I don’t know who I am without it.

What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents , or my own?

You can hardly imagine how I am struggling to exert my poetical ideas just now for the discovery of analogies and remote figures respecting the earth, sun, and all sorts of things — for I think that is the true way (corrected by judgment) to work out a discovery.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.