An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity

If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'

Most of the forward movements of life in general ... have been the work of essentially religiously-minded people.

Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently, when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep.

All melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded-the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood and the sap of the trees.

There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment - though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.