The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.
As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.
Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.
Music is the universal language of mankind.
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
Evil is only good perverted.
Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.
Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.
The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.
However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.
The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
All things must change to something new, to something strange.
All things come round to him who will but wait.
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.
Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
The dawn is not distant, nor is the night starless; love is eternal.
There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
Build today, then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure. Shall tomorrow find its place.
The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.
The nearer the dawn the darker the night.
Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.
Love gives itself; it is not bought.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
Resolve and thou art free.
Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved.
They who go Feel not the pain of parting; it is they Who stay behind that suffer.
Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak.
A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.
The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.
The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain.
It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.
Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.
Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
Into each life some rain must fall.
