“You have been second always. Tragical?No. You preferred it to the usual thing:One dull man, dulling and uxorious,One average mind- with one thought less, each year.”

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”

“With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

“Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”

“My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.”

“There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.”