It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.

There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.

Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.