“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”

Time, so complain’d of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm’d hours.

The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.

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?

They say my verse is sad: no wonder; Its narrow measure spans Tears of eternity, and sorrow, Not mine. but man’s.

I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Men of culture are the true apostles of equality

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.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.