I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry that is, prose = words in their best order – poetry = the best words in the best order.
Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.
A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
Sympathy constitutes friendship but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.