Only poetry inspires poetry.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.
All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.
Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?
Everything intercepts us from ourselves.
Every man is an impossibility until he is born.
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.
A strenuous soul hates cheap success.
A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.
Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.
As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!
As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar.
We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
Claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.
Accept your genius and say what you think.
