“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.”
“A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.”
“As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.”
“To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.”
“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.”
“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
“Sympathy constitutes friendship but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.”
“Friendship is a sheltering tree.”
“Love is flower like Friendship is like a sheltering tree.”
“Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
“The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are one, Security to possessors two, facility to acquirers and three, hope to all.”
“I have seen great intolerance shown in support of tolerance.”
“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions - the little, soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.”
“He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.”
“No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.”
“People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.”
“A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.”
“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”
“Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.”
“Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.”
“The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.”
“The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.”
“How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.”
“Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.”
“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”
“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is, prose = words in their best order - poetry = the best words in the best order.”
“Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”
“Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.”
“All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.”
“Alas! they had been friends in youth but whispering tongues can poison truth.”
“He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”
“Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.”