Poet Quotes

“In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length, and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

“Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength.”

“There is a chasm between knowledge and ignorance which the arches of science can never span.”

“You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; may be you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it.”

“Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.”

“There is one consolation in being sick; and that is the possibility that you may recover to a better state than you were ever in before.”

“We seem to think that the earth must go through the ordeal of sheep-pasturage before it is habitable by man.”

“The virtue which we appreciate, we to some extent appropriate.”

“I stand in awe of my body.”

“In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.”

“Hence it will not do for the Landlord to possess too fine a nature.... He must have no idiosyncracies, no particular bents or tendencies to this or that, but a general, uniform, and healthy development, such as his portly person indicates, offering himself equally on all sides to men.”

“As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.”

“I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me.”

“One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.”

“Tradition is a more interrupted and feebler memory.”

“They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,--how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.”

“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth”

“What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.”

“A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more "harmonious compositions."”

“If one hesitates in his path, let him not proceed. Let him respect his doubts, for doubts, too, may have some divinity in them.”

“It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.”

“I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.”

“What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.”

“Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.”