“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.”

“Nor age so eat up my invention.”

“Invention breeds invention.”

“One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.”

“I remember the thought which occurred to me when some ingenious and spiritual foreigners came to America, was, Have you been victimized in being brought hither?--or, prior to that, answer me this, "Are you victimizable?”

“The rage for road building is beneficent for America, where vast distance is so main a consideration in our domestic politics andtrade, inasmuch as the great political promise of the invention is to hold the Union staunch, whose days already seem numbered by the mere inconvenience of transporting representatives, judges and officers across such tedious distances of land and water.”

“Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, as we shall yet have an American genius.”

“Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country, as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court.”

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

“If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.”

“This blessèd plot, this earth, this realm, this EnglandThis nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,. . .This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land.”

“This England never did, nor never shall,Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,But when it first did help to wound itself.Now these her princes are come home again,Come the three corners of the world in arms,And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,If England to itself do rest but true.”

“More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.”

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white sugar.”

“The house praises the carpenter.”

“If a man knows the law, find out, though he live in a pine shanty, and resort to him. And if a man can pipe or sing, so as to wrap the imprisoned soul in an elysium; or can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; or can liberate and intoxicate all people who hear him with delicious songs and verses; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.”

“Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.”

“Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“Every known fact in natural science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was actually verified.”

“The breach of customIs breach of all.”

“Liberty plucks justice by the nose; The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart Goes all decorum.”

“What is the city but the people?”

“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that's put to use more gold begets.”

“I am wealthy in my friends.”

“If thou art rich, thou art poor; for, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows, thou bearest thy heavy riches but a journey, and death unloads thee.”