“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week.
“Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works
“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance
“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject
“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity - he is continually informing and filling some other body
“The trumpet does no more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility
“A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing
“The most accomplished monkey cannot draw a monkey, this only man can do; just as it is also only man who regards his ability to do this as a distinct merit