When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.

If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

To be simple is the best thing in the world.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.