"[Oxford] whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."

"The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"what thwarts us and demands of us the greatest effort is also what can teach us most."

"Eyes too expressive to be blue, / Too lovely to be grey."

"Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing."

"Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit."

"Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances."

"(Poetry) a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty"

"I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

"Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare."

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things."

"Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."

"For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment."

"Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge."

"Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern."

"Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"

"Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away."

"To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive."

"And we forget because we must and not because we will."

"Culture is to know the best that has been said and thought in the world."

"France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme."

"It is so small a think to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done."

"Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it."

"Resolve to be thyself; and know that who finds himself, loses his misery."

"Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore."

"Journalism is literature in a hurry."

"Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur."

"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly."

"The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion."

"This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims."

"Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall."

"Sad Patience, too near neighbour to despair."

"It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence."

"Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

"Greatness is a spiritual condition."

"Nor bring to see me cease to live,/ Some doctor full of phrase and fame,/ To shake his sapient head, and give/ The ill he cannot cure a name."

"Creep into thy narrow bed, / Creep, and let no more be said!"

"Because thou must not dream, thou need not despair."

"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success."

"Now the great winds shoreward blow, / Now the salt tides seaward flow; / Now the wild white horses play, / Champ and chafe and toss in the spray."

"But the majestic river floated on, / Out of the mist and hum of that low land, / Into the frosty starlight, and there moved, / Rejoicing, through the hushed Chorasmian waste, / Under the solitary moon."

"The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject"

"But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will."

"And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night"

"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace."

"And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know, / Self-schooled, self-scanned, self-honoured, self-secure / Didst tread on earth unguessed at. Better so!"

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things"

"With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair."