Spleen can subsist on any kind of food.

I am proud up to the point of equality; everything above or below that appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.

A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them

True modesty and true pride are much the same thing: both consist in setting a just value on ourselves - neither more nor less.

To display the greatest powers, unless they are applied to great purposes, makes nothing for the character of greatness.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.