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

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.