An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.