“Art is the objectification of feeling.”

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Fame is an accident; merit a thing absolute.

Failure is the test of greatness.

Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

We are only what we are; not what we would be; nor every thing we hope for. We are but a step in a scale, that reaches further above us than below.

Dream tonight of peacock tails, Diamond fields and spouter whales. Ills are many, blessing few, But dreams tonight will shelter you.

Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.

All things that God would have us do are hard for us to do–remember that–and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavours to persuade.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

My body is but the lees of my better being.

There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.

The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.

Meditation and water are wedded for ever.

The eyes are the gateway to the soul.

Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art– Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite.

So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.