“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.”

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“Literature is a comprehensive essence of the intellectual life of a nation.”

“It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.”

“But, if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminodas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and had given that book immense fame.”

“I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.”

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.”

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.”

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Ideas are the very coinage of your brain.”

“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?”

“Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity.”

“Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,Live regist'red upon our brazen tombsAnd then grace us in the disgrace of death;When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,Th' endeavor of this present breath may buyThat honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edgeAnd make us heirs of all eternity.”

“Love bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

“When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.”

“A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.”

“I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.”

“Be just, and fear not.”

“Life every man holds dear; but the dear man holds honor far more precious dear than life.”

“Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.”

“Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try.”

“Time, that takes survey of all the world,Must have a stop.”

“The time is out of joint.”

“Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:O no! it is an ever-fixed markThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wandering bark,Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending sickle's compass come:Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,But bears it out even to the edge of doom.If this be error and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

“To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I ey'd, Such seems your beauty still.”

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom staleHer infinite variety.”