A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.