"Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind? He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men, Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen, And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind."

"But be his My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul, From first youth tested up to extreme old age, Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole."

"If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers."

"Such a price The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing."

"Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole: The mellow glory of the Attic stage."

"France, fam'd in all great arts, in none supreme."

"Eutrapelia. "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners."

"English civilization — the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society — that is what interests me."

"Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class."

"For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."

"That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation."

"At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is."

"The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"Come, dear children, let us away; Down and away below. Now my brothers call from the bay; Now the great winds shoreward blow; Now the salt tides seaward flow; Now the wild white horses play, Champ and chafe and toss in the spray. Children dear, let us away. This way, this way!"

"Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel — below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed."

"Choose equality."

"What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty."

"Far, far from here, The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills; ... And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes, Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia, Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore, In breathless quiet, after all their ills."

"Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head and give The ill he cannot cure a name."

"The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again."

"Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory!"

"Hath man no second life? — Pitch this one high!"

"Was Christ a man like us? — Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!"

"I will not say that thou wast true, Yet let me say that thou wast fair! And they that lovely face who view, They should not ask if truth be there."

"It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think."

"It is — last stage of all — When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man."

"With women the heart argues, not the mind."

"Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself."

"Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat."

"Style...is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it."

"Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again! For so the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day."

"Their ineffectual feuds and feeble hates, Shadows of hates, but they distress them still."

"But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok’d souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will."

"Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore."

"How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still."

"This truth — to prove, and make thine own: ‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’"

"A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again."

"A man becomes aware of his life's flow... And there arrives a lull in the hot race."

"And then he thinks he knows The Hills where his life rose, And the Sea where it goes."

"Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates."

"The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure."

"The same heart beats in every human breast."

"Her cabin’d, ample Spirit, It flutter’d and fail’d for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty Hall of Death."

"Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew. In quiet she reposes: Ah! would that I did too."

"Hark! ah, the nightingale — The tawny-throated! Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! hark! — what pain!"

"Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?"