“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”

All powerful souls have kindred with each other

If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?.

No man does anything from a single motive.

Nothing can permanently please, which doesn’t contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.

Within today, tomorrow is already walking.

He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses , each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination.

The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon ‘s immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

A man’s as old as he’s feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

The rules of prudence, like the laws of the stone tables, are for the most part prohibitive. “Thou shalt not” is their characteristic formula.

Men of genius are rarely much annoyed by the company of vulgar people, because they have a power of looking at such persons as objects of amusement of another race altogether.

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

How wonderfully beautiful is the delineation of the characters of the three patriarchs in Genesis! To be sure if ever man could, without impropriety, be called, or supposed to be, “the friend of God,” Abraham was that man.

Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame.

The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Since it has such a remembrance of the best, such a concern for the future, since it is enriched with so many arts, sciences, and discoveries, it is impossible but the being which contains all these must be immortal.

In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food.

He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.

I’ve had a lot of practice and wrong’s what I do best.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer’s first duty is to use language well.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

The best thing to do is dive with your imagination ~ you can never drown yourself.