How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!

Saw life steadily and saw it whole.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

It does not try to reach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords of its own. It seeks to away with classes, to make the best that has been taught and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely--nourished, and not bound by them.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.