The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin; the discipline of the New Testament, as a discipline teaching us to die to it.
History – a vast Mississippi of falsehoods.
To the Bible men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it.
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men’s spirits are indissolubly held.
How many minds – almost all the great ones – were formed in secrecy and solitude!
Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine.
The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife.
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.
Religion – that voice of the deepest human experience.
If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.
Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!
For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.
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.