“For poetry, like science, has its final precision; and there are expressions of poetic knowledge which can no more be rewritten than could the elements of geometry.”

Describing great poetic language as exact, definitive and impossible to improve upon · Lecture on the poetry of Wordsworth

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“And simple enjoyments are, if not the most voluptuous and delicately refined, assuredly the manliest and healthiest, the most honest and rational and permanent.”

Defending modest pleasures as more enduring and honourable than ostentation · Essay on retrenchment during the Irish Famine, 1847

• Joy
• Truth

“People won’t read Chaucer against their ears.”

Insisting that the sound and metre of poetry must be made perceptible to readers · Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 9 December 1853

• Music
• Poetry

“Go straight on, however, and one’s sure to come out into a new country, on the other side the hills, sunny and bright.”

Using a railway journey as an image of perseverance through difficult periods · Letter from Cambridge, Massachusetts, 23 February 1853

• Hope
• Time

“Ignorance is a poor kind of innocence. The world is wiser than the wise, and as innocent as the innocent; and it has long been found out what is the best way of taking things.”

Arguing that genuine understanding requires experience beyond sheltered learning · Letter to a friend, 19 June 1850

• Truth
• Wisdom

“All things become clear to me by work more than by anything else. Any kind of drudgery will help one out of the most uncommon either sentimental or speculative perplexity.”

Presenting purposeful work as an antidote to emotional and intellectual confusion · Letter, March 1852

• Hope
• Truth
• Work

“Still we may be well assured that only time can work out any sort of answer to them for us.”

Counselling patience when confronting profound moral and spiritual questions · Letter, March 1852

• Hope
• Time
• Truth

“A bad style is as bad as bad manners, and manners you admit do mean something. Things really ill-written it does one a little harm to read.”

Linking careless expression with a failure of consideration for the reader · Letter, February 1852

• Art
• Truth