“Our thoughts and feelings are modifications of our spiritual substance, and the soul, as a phonograph, retains them all forever, to lie tacit or to be summoned at need.”

Imagining memory as a permanent recording within the soul · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XXIX

• Faith
• Memory

“We often mistake our own sweet childhood for the old time, which, had we lived in it, we should have found almost as intolerable as our own.”

A shrewd observation on nostalgia and the idealisation of the past · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XXVI

• Childhood
• Memory
• Time

“No great art, no really effective ethical teaching can come from any but such as know immeasurably more than they will attempt to communicate.”

Arguing that powerful art depends upon depths that remain largely unstated · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XXV

• Art
• Truth

“The promises of the Devil are kept to the letter and broken in the spirit; God's promises are commonly broken to the letter and fulfilled past all hope to the spirit.”

Contrasting superficial fulfilment with deeper and unexpected grace · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XVIII

• Faith
• Hope

“Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural, but is supernaturally natural.”

Expressing Patmore's conviction that spiritual fulfilment completes rather than suppresses nature · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XVII

• Faith
• Nature

“Great is his faith who dares believe his own eyes.”

Valuing the courage to trust genuine perception · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XVI

• Faith
• Truth

“Greatly to live is such a burthen of joy that the sharpest pain of sacrifice is a welcome easement of it.”

Describing intense joy and sacrifice as strangely complementary experiences · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XIV

• Faith
• Joy

“Lovers put out the candles and draw the curtains, when they wish to see the god and the goddess; and in the higher Communion, the night of thought is the light of perception.”

Linking human intimacy with mystical perception beyond ordinary reason · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XIII

• Faith
• Love

“The spirit of man is like a kite, which rises by means of those very forces which seem to oppose its rise.”

Presenting resistance and difficulty as forces that can lift the human spirit · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XII

• Faith
• Hope

“When a thing manifestly is, none but fools will trouble themselves with difficulties as to how it can be.”

Warning against allowing explanation to obscure direct perception · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XI

• Truth

“Heaven, Earth, Sea, and Hell witness with a thousand voices the secret which is the sole felicity of man; and almost all men refuse to hear.”

Contrasting the abundance of spiritual signs with humanity's failure to perceive them · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta VIII

• Faith
• Truth

“If you wish to influence the world for good, leave it, forget it, and think of nothing but your own interests.”

A paradox suggesting that genuine reform begins with the cultivation of one's own life · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta I

• Solitude
• Truth

“We become more self-centred as we get old, and our environment, the scenery of life, becomes more important.”

Observing how ageing can deepen inwardness and attachment to surroundings · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIX

• Nature
• Solitude
• Time

“Town is the theatre for activity in relation to the actual world, solitude in the country creates reflection, the luxury or the pain of life.”

Contrasting urban action with the reflective intensity of rural solitude · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIX

• Nature
• Solitude

“It was as if I had awoke into another world beyond the pulsation of the senses, a state of things that would last for ever.”

Describing profound stillness as an experience outside ordinary sensory life · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIX

• Nature
• Solitude
• Time

“Religion gives us ideals; science gives us command; morals give us justice; arts, beauty; medicine preserves and improves the body; civil law defends us against ourselves.”

Summarising the distinct roles of faith, knowledge, ethics, art and social order · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIV

• Beauty
• Faith
• Truth

“Writing, without something urgently requiring to be said, ends in imitation, restoration, selection.”

Arguing that genuine writing begins with something that demands expression · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XII

• Art
• Truth

“The more knowing the aspirant is, the more imitative he is, and the less he depends on original powers, invention, and knowledge of life.”

Warning that excessive literary knowingness can weaken originality · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XII

• Art
• Truth

“Poetry without this absolutely critical sincerity and truth may be beautiful, but its beauty is to me not charming but offensive.”

Rejecting poetic beauty when it is detached from sincerity and truth · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter IX

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Truth

“In my estimate of the poet's true mission in this world, I hold that whatever he says should be the vital truth in relation to the thing mentioned, man or fact in story or nature.”

Making fidelity to essential truth central to the poet's calling · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter IX

• Nature
• Poetry
• Truth

“I have always found original genius of a concentrated and peculiar kind the most dangerous endowment.”

Treating intense originality as a gift that can also imperil balance · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter I

• Art
• Truth

“I have found my greatest happiness in thinking rightly, rather than in acting successfully.”

Placing sound judgement above outward success as a source of happiness · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter XXIV

• Joy
• Truth

“We often say in the battle of life as in the game of chess—Had I only played this, and not that!”

Comparing regret over past choices to replaying a game whose later moves would also change · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter XXIV

• Memory
• Time

“The only desirable and vital workmanship is that which honestly and directly expresses our own conceptions and observations.”

Defining worthwhile art as honest expression of personal perception · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter XXIII

• Art
• Truth