“The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.”

Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills.

How did the atheist get his idea of that God whom he denies?

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

We shall only differ in degree and not in kind,–just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of the materialists of all the schools, or almost all.

Oh, the difficulty of fixing the attention of men on the world within them!

Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.

We may recur to it year after year, and it will supply the same nourishment and the same gratification, if only we ourselves return to it with the same healthful appetite.

An undevout poet is an impossibility.

I love being superior to myself better than [to] my equals.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

We are not surprised that Abimelech and Ephron seem to reverence him so profoundly. He was peaceful, because of his conscious relation to God.

It [is] very unfair to influence a child’s mind by inculcating any opinions before it [has] come to years of discretion to choose for itself.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

He prayeth best who loveth best.

It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.

Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.