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

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

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

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