There is a majesty and mystery in nature, take her as you will. The essence of poetry comes breathing to a mind that feels from every province of her empire.
I want to meet my God awake.
A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has an appetite for; what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books.
Is not light grander than fire?
The civil authority, or that part of it which remained faithful to their trust and true to the ends of the covenant, did, in answer to their consciences, turn out a tyrant, in a way which the Christians in aftertimes will mention with honor, and all tyrants in the world look at with fear.
Lies exist only to be extinguished.
Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.
Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect, is in the first plane moral. What a world were this otherwise!
Man, it is not thy works, which are mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.
Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.
The philosopher is he to whom the highest has descended, and the lowest has mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker has given.
Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
An everlasting lodestar, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night.
Roguery is thought by some to be cunning and laughable: it is neither; it is devilish.
No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.
He who cannot withal keep his mind to himself cannot practice any considerable thing whatsoever.
Silence is the eternal duty of man.
Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Professors of the Dismal Science, I perceive the length of your tether is now pretty well run; and I must request you to talk a little lower in the future.