Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.
The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .
Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat.
Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.
I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.
The world hath failed to impart the joy our youth forebodes; failed to fill up the void which in our breasts we bear.
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.
And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.
Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held.
Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.
Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.
And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.
Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.
And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well -- but 'tis not true!
Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the sky, to have loved, to have thought, to have done?
All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
Man errs not that he deems His welfare his true aim, He errs because he dreams The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.
But so many books thou readest, But so many schemes thou breedest, But so many wishes feedest, That thy poor head almost turns.
The eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving the world, a warning cry against the "Anglo- Saxon contagion.
Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power.
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.
We, peopling the void air, Make Gods to whom to impute The ills we ought to bear; With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.
I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference.
The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.
I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.
Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.
There is no better motto which it [culture] can have than these words of Bishop Wilson, "To make reason and the will of God prevail."
Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again. For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day.
Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell.
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.
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.
All pains the immortal spirit must endure, All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, Find their sole voice in that victorious brow.
Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.
Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.
Nature's great law, and the law of all men's minds? To its own impulse every creature stirs: Live by thy light, and Earth will live by hers.
Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.
Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force: But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
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.