Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Come to me in my dreams, and thenBy day I shall be well again.For then the night will more than payThe hopeless longing of the day.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.

The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

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

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

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

Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.

Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair.

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.

Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair.

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our...

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

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

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.

Alas, is even Love too weak to unlock the heart and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel?

For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire, Show’d me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the...

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

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

Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing:...

The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

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

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

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

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love,...

Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest and admiration.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

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

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our...

Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.

It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Weary of myself, and sick of asking What I am, and what I ought to be, At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me Forwards, forwards, o’er the starlit sea.

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.

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

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

Only–but this is rare–When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,When our world-deafen’d earIs by the tones of...

The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply...