Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.

O Captain my Captain! our fearful trip is done, / The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won

An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation.

Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep for the dead I loved so well.

Unscrew the locks from the doors ! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs !

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, My breath will not be obedient to its organs, I become a dumb man.