I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.
Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Journalism is literature in a hurry.
The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.
Genius is mainly an affair of energy.
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
Art still has truth. Take refuge there.
On Sundays, at the matin-chime, The Alpine peasants, two and three, Climb up here to pray; Burghers and dames, at summer’s prime, Ride out to church from Chamberry, Dight with mantles gay, But else it is a lonely time Round the Church of Brou.
Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below!
Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.
Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.
Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.
If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
And amongst us one, Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.
Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.