And each day brings it’s pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.
Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.
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.
Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are...
Ah love, let us be true to one another, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams; so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy nor love nor life.
The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun...
Greatness is a spiritual condition.
All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.
The “hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and, pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,” this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters.
Men of culture are the true apostles of equality.
Culture is both an intellectual phenomenon and a moral one.
One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man’s life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.
Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.
The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
The kings of modern thought are dumb.