How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.

A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.

... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.

The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.