Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.
When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.
I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, and the Islands, – the Genius and creative Principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind.
He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
The days come and go but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.
Build therefore your own world.
Things refuse to be mismanaged for long.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.
The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.
The sun shines today also.
There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes much impression on him, and another none.
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?