Quotes to inspire and reflect

She lived unknown, and few could know

She was a phantom of delight.

A violet by a mossy stone

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

The good old rule

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,

Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;

We poets in our youth begin in gladness;

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,

All things have second birth;

In common things that round us lie

The statue stood

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,

Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Plain living and high thinking are no more:

But for those obstinate questionings

And by the vision splendid

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The rainbow comes and goes,

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The Child is father of the Man.

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

And much it grieved my heart to think

A sense sublime

The still, sad music of humanity,

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

For oft, when on my couch I lie

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

All shod with steel

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

The light that never was, on sea or land,

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

As an experience, madness is terrific … and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

I read the book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes well out of it.

I have lost friends, some by death … others through sheer inability to cross the street.

The scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

On or about December 1910 human nature changed.

Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Electric Kool-Aid Acid test.

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.