“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”

“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?”

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”

“When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?”