“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents that he understands their arguments, and sympathies with their just feelings.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius – the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:–for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty.

Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation

That gracious thing, made up of tears and light.

And in today already walks tomorrow.

Be not merely a man of letters! Let literature be an honorable augmentations to your arms, not constitute the coat or fill the escutcheon!

I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that every Thing has a Life of its own, and that we are all one Life.

Those who best know human nature will acknowledge most fully what a strength light hearted nonsense give to a hard working man

Advice is like snow – the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

It is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.

We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble – all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure!

In my opinion, there is a huge lack of imaginative, unconventional music being created by artists today and what little there is, goes widely unappreciated by the masses

The traditional difficulty of balancing the mechanical with the imaginative schools of photography still operates.

Only recently serious research into the relationship between photography and art has taken place. Why has it been so long in coming ? In some respects historical research is analogous with that of science.

People who get Nobel prizes aren’t necessarily the most imaginative of people. People who sometimes find a system, develop a system, do very useful work.