In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

The imaginative faculty of the soul must be fed with objects immense and eternal.

Nature is good, but intellect is better, as the law-giver is before the law-receiver.

Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare.

American mind a wilderness of opportunities.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.