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

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.

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.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps.

What is with waiters who don’t write anything down and memorize your order instead? Are you trying to impress me or something? If you were that smart you wouldn’t be a goddamn waiter in the first place.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.