He loves not who does not see the faults of the beloved as virtues.

Classicism is health, romanticisim is sickness.

It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.

Waste not a day in vain digression; with resolute, courageous trust seek every possible impression and make it firmly your posession you'll then work on because you must.

When you take a man as he is, you make him worse. When you take a man as he can be, you make him better.

Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.

The poet should seize the Particular, and he should, if there be anything sound in it, thus represent the Universal.