“Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.”

Capturing the way childhood and youth can seem disproportionately spacious in memory · Prose, The Doctor

• Childhood
• Memory
• Time

“Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on.”

Contrasting animal instinct with humanity’s capacity to misuse reason · Prose, Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies, 1829

• Animals
• Humanity
• Instinct

“Pour out your mind in a great poem, and you will exercise authority over the feelings and opinions of mankind as long as the language lasts in which you write.”

Expressing his belief in poetry’s lasting influence through language · Letter to Walter Savage Landor, 2 May 1808

• Influence
• Language
• Poetry