The poet is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe who brings the whole soul of man into activity.

Imagination that compares and contrasts with what is around as well as what is better and worse is the living power and prime agent of all human perception judgement and emotional reaction.

What is one man's gain is another's loss.

The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols.

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

Genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power.

A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.