“The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.”

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.

Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?

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.

The degradation of our environment is undeniably a direct result of our lack of regard, lack of accountability, and lack of responsibility.

You absorb so much from whatever your environment is, as an artist, and you learn to take from it what can help you create.

The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

A man who doesn’t think differently from his time and environment can’t grow beyond his time and environment.

The revolt against one’s environment is usually ‘shame’ of one’s environment.

No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning.

Environmental injustice is a tangible, intolerable example of an exhibited moral laxity and minimal concern for healthy standards by corporations and political structures based on the race, ethnicity, and class of those being impacted.