“Until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”

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.

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

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.

I always find it incredibly difficult to figure out whether I should reach for the check or not. I don’t want to presume anything, but I don’t want to be a ball-buster.

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.

In athletics, the idea of possibility is presumed. It’s not ‘if;’ it’s ‘how.’

People presume my disability has to do with being an amputee, but that’s not the case.

Now the pessimist proper is the most modest of men. … under no circumstances does he presume to imagine that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree change or soften the remorseless words of fate.