Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

Nothing can be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are playing in the sky.

Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grandand immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.

We live ruins amid ruins.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

The world belongs to the energetic.