The poet alone knows astronomy, chemistry, vegetation, and animation, for he does not stop at these facts, but employs them as signs. He knows why the plain, or meadow of space, was strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars; why the deep is adorned with animals, with men, and gods; for, in every word he speaks he rides on them as the horses of thought.

Be as beneficent as the sun or the sea, but if your rights as a rational being are trenched on, die on the first inch of your territory.

...as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them.

Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge.

The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies we call fate, love, and reason visibly stream.

Whatever appeals to the imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of human ability, wonderfully encourages and liberates us.

Throw a stone into the stream and the ripples that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.