Only that is poetry which cleanses and mans me.

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams if you don't follow through.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

Vivacity, leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot be had.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

Man sheds grief as his skin sheds rain.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.