Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.
At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.
I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.
Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.
Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.
To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.
However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.
I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.
For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.
I knew the mass of men conceal’d Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.
Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, He read each wound, each weakness clear – And struck his finger on the place, And said – Thou ailest here, and here.
And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well – but ’tis not true!
Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
English civilization the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society that is what interests me.
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, Long since, saw Byron ’s struggle cease.
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.