“How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.”

Defending the imaginative freedom of poetry against rigid historical constraint · From the Preface to Gondibert

• Freedom
• Imagination
• Poetry

“Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off.”

On how recognition grows with distance and time, while local familiarity diminishes it · Attributed remark (widely circulated; exact source uncertain but consistently linked to him)

• Fame
• Legacy
• Reputation