What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.

It is told of Faraday that he refused to be called a physicist; he very much disliked the new name as being too special and particular and insisted on the old one, philosopher, in all its spacious generality: we may suppose that this was his way of saying that he had not over-ridden the limiting conditions of class only to submit to the limitation of a profession.