Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.