He spoke, and loos’d our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth.
We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides, The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides: But tasks in hours of insight will’d Can be through hours of gloom fulfill’d.
Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.
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!