Be not a slave of words.

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance. In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.

There is in man a higher than love of happiness; he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.