Good poetry seems so simple and natural a thing that when we meet it we wonder that all men are not always poets. Poetry is nothing but healthy speech.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

You must get your living by loving, or at least half your life is a failure.

I had a classmate who fitted for college by the lamps of a lighthouse, which was more light, we think, than the University afforded.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit ~ not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.