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.

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

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.

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 principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

People of humor are always in some degree people of genius.

As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.

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.

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.

Not one man in a thousand has the strength of mind or the goodness of heart to be an atheist.

The love of a mother is the veil of a softer light between the heart and the heavenly Father.

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.

Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.

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.

Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure.