Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty.

There is a property in the horizon which no man has, but he whose eyes can integrate all the parts,--that is, the poet.

Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well.

The eye is easily frightened.

We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.

The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.