Who hesitate and falter life away, and lose tomorrow the ground won today.

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

Good poetry does undoubtedly tend to form the soul and character; it tends to beget a love of beauty and of truth in alliance together, it suggests, however indirectly, high and noble principles of action, and it inspires the emotion so helpful in making principles operative.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.... He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

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