“Thou art a dreaming thing,A fever of thyself.”
“If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally.”
“Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!”
“Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!”
“Be not another if thou canst be thyself.”
“And if you but listen in the stillness of the night, you shall hear them saying in silence, 'Our God, who art our winged self... we cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us; Thou art our needs, and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all.”