Every old poem is sacred.
It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.
Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.
The man is either mad, or he is making verses.
The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.
O imitators, you slavish herd!
No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Tis a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration.
Follow your own passion – not your parents’, not your teachers’- yours.
Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.
That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.
The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.
It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.
The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.
The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
Art is the path of the creator to his work.
Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.
