The heart less bounding at emotion new, The hope, once crushed, less quick to spring again.
Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.
Cutlure looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, – the passion for sweetness and light.
We must hold fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs politics and saves or destroys states. Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable, things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these, is what saves states.
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
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.