My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.

To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

You must find the ideas that have some promise in them... It is not enough to just have ideas.

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.

I am quite sure that no friendship yields its true pleasure and nobility of nature without frequent communication, sympathy and service.