“I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility.”

Describing love as a profound experience of spiritual and physical unity · Letter to Waldo Frank, 21 April 1924

• Faith
• Joy
• Love

“A good woman is a wondrous creature, cleaving to the right and the good in all change; lovely in her youthful comeliness, lovely all her life long in comeliness of heart.”

Praising steadfast goodness and the lasting beauty of character · Letter to Emily Sellwood, 1839

• Beauty
• Love
• Truth

“There is no greater force in the world than love.”

Affirming love as the strongest influence in human life · Prose writing, commonly attributed

• Hope
• Love

“But there must be love and trust: without that all education outside book-learning is for ever impossible.”

Making affection and trust fundamental to meaningful education · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter IX: Praise and Punishment

• Education
• Love
• Trust

“There are for me three dominant images which are as doors into fuller life; and these are woman, tree and the unicorn.”

Names three recurring symbols through which he imagines a larger existence · Diary, 1939

• Art
• Love
• Nature

“Voluntary dependence is the most beautiful condition, and how could it be possible without love.”

Original: Freiwillige Abhängigkeit ist der schönste Zustand, und wie wäre der möglich ohne Liebe. — Goethe presents freely chosen attachment as a paradoxical form of freedom grounded in love. · The Elective Affinities (German)

• Attachment
• Freedom
• Love

“Poems in my Spoon River books about faithful and loving hearts, about kind and generous and hopeful people.”

Highlights the compassionate and hopeful dimension of his work often overshadowed by its darker reputation · Letter to August Derleth, 1939

• Hope
• Kindness
• Love

“Work is love made visible.”

Meaningful labour becomes an outward expression of love · Prose work

• Art
• Love

“What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

Suggesting that familiarity can deepen affection rather than diminish it · Prose remark

• Beauty
• Love
• Memory

“Do you think that this will not exist for ever and ever: two prayers struck together into one prayer, two loves into one love, two forces into one force.”

Original: Czyś ty nigdy nie marzyła, droga moja, o spiorunowaniu dwóch modlitw w jedną modlitwę, dwojga miłości w jedną miłość, dwóch sił w jedną siłę? Czy ty myślisz, że tego na wieki wieków nie będzie? — He imagines human and spiritual unity as a force created by joining separate lives and purposes. · Letter to his mother, 15 October 1845 (Polish)

• Hope
• Love
• Unity

“But this life is half made up of partings, and these pains must be borne.”

Accepting separation as an unavoidable part of human life · Letter to Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, 1868

• Love
• Time

“Your own feelings, and none but your own, should determine such an important point.”

Urging her niece to trust her own feelings when deciding whom to marry · Letter to Fanny Knight, 30 November 1814

• Independence
• Love
• Trust

“Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven.”

An unusually candid statement of affection and longing · Letter to Katharine Coman, 1891

• Faith
• Longing
• Love

“The test of poetry is not in reason but in a delight not different from the delight that comes to a man at the first coming of love into the heart.”

Locating poetry's ultimate test in felt delight rather than intellectual argument · Essay, Why the Blind Man in Ancient Times Was Made a Poet

• Emotion
• Love
• Poetry

“It is obvious that we can no more explain a passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind.”

Emphasising the limits of explanation when experience itself is absent · Dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley

• Love
• Truth

“How far away we are from each other. Two walls of flesh between me and the nearest person on earth.”

Expressing the loneliness that persists even within intimacy · Gathered Leaves, letters and diaries, 1889

• Love
• Solitude

“The poetry is you, I told you, because poetry is feeling, and feeling is woman.”

Original: La poesía eres tú, te he dicho, porque la poesía es el sentimiento, y el sentimiento es la mujer. — Bécquer identifies poetry with feeling rather than with literary technique or formal rules. · Letter I, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

• Feeling
• Love
• Poetry

“Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so well together is untouched, unchanged.”

Affirming the continuity of identity and affection after bereavement · Sermon, Death the King of Terrors

• Death
• Love
• Memory

“We fancy we suffer from ingratitude, while in reality we suffer from self-love.”

Self-love as the root of perceived ingratitude · Conversation / essay (as commonly attributed)

• Ingratitude
• Love
• Self

“Love at first sight, the birth of an instant, strikes nevertheless its roots far deeper in the heart than the affection which takes months in maturing.”

Claiming that sudden love may prove deeper than slowly formed attachment · Essay, A Sixty-Drop Dose of Laudanum, Drop 33

• Love
• Time

“Teachers and parents alike have come to feel that the love of poetry in general is more to be desired for children than the knowledge of certain “well known” poems.”

Putting a lasting love of poetry above prescribed literary knowledge · Prefatory Note, Rainbow Gold, 1922

• Childhood
• Love
• Poetry

“The dear world in every part is Home to the spirit that loves life and freedom, and discerns no frontiers between nation and nation, nor barriers between man and man.”

A generous late-life vision of human belonging beyond national boundaries · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

• Hope
• Love
• Time

“You must always love them as much as I love you, and you must teach them how to be good boys, which I cannot do as well as you can.”

A father's trust in his child's goodness · Letter to his son Arnold (as quoted in Edward Dowden, Studies in Literature, 1878)

• Fatherhood
• Love
• Teaching

“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy.”

A creed of open-hearted generosity offered as the poet's own rule of living · Preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition

• Faith
• Love