You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it never Rises from the soul, and sways The heart of every single hearer, With deepest power, in simple ways. You’ll sit forever, gluing things together, Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps, Blowing on a miserable fire, Made from your heap of dying ash. Let apes and children praise your art, If their admiration’s to your taste, But you’ll never speak from heart to heart, Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

People are always talking about originality, but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work upon us, and this goes on to the end.

Poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men.

We can stand only a certain amount of unhappiness; anything beyond that annihilates us or passes us by, leaving us apathethetic.

Look at a man the way he is and he only becomes worse, but look at him as if he were what he could be, then he becomes what he should be.

The absence of temptation is the absence of virtue.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.