"We admire Chaucer for his sturdy English..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“The whole of the day should not be daytime; there should be one hour, if not more, which the day did not bring forth.”

“The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.”

“But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness.”

“Literature is my Utopia”

“One should not be too severe on English novels; they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.”

“If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.”

“What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.”

“The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves itto the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. This is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small.”

“The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.”