💬 Quotes

"To be a philosophical skeptic is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian."

"If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful, and proportioned a machine! And may we not prostrate ourselves before the universe, and confess it to be the work of a yet more perfect designer?"

"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!"

"O, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive!"

"Sound, clarion, sound! fill, blow, full blast! / One blast were worth an interim of days, / Life-giving, 'midst the chorus of acclaim."

"Soldiers, rest! thy warfare o'er, / Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking; / Dream of battle fields no more, / Days of danger, nights of waking."

"Time rolls his ceaseless course. The race of yore, / Who danced our infancy upon their knee, / And told our marveling boyhood legends store, / Of their strange ventures happ'd by land or sea, / How are they blotted from the things to be!"

"To all, to each, a fair good-night, / And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light."

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

"Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy."

"Paper patient than people."

"Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness."

"As long as this exists, and this should last forever, this sunshine, this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?"

"Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!"

"Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood."

"Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament... through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."

"The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place."

"Homer surely deserves praise on many other counts, and especially because he alone among epic poets is not unaware of the part to be played by the poet himself in the poem."

"For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place."

"A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility."