Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world.