“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”

Describing poetry as a vital, animating form of understanding · Essay / as commonly attributed

• Poetry
• Truth

“Good words are worth much, and cost little.”

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

• Friendship
• Truth

“Few words are used in their central sense: in innumerable cases an accidental sense having become the accepted meaning. Poets restore the central sense.”

On poetry's power to recover the force hidden inside familiar words · Unpublished notes, Poetry and Art

• Poetry
• Truth

“They never wrote except on matters which they understood.”

Valuing knowledge grounded in genuine understanding · Memorial essay, Edward Cheney

• Art
• Truth

“The poet is the interpreter of the world to men, and the interpreter of men to themselves.”

Presenting poetry as a bridge between outward reality and inward experience · Essay on poetry

• Poetry
• Truth

“Heigho! what charming things would sublime theories be, if one could make one's practice keep up with them; but I am convinced it is impossible, and am resolved to make the best of every-day nature.”

A witty preference for practical humanity over perfect theories · Letter to Mrs Taylor, 1797

• Joy
• Truth

“The most pregnant passages of Scripture, of the wise ancients, and of great poets are those which seem to you to have no meaning, or an absurd one.”

Defending difficulty and paradox as signs that a text may contain deeper significance · The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Aurea Dicta XCIV

• Poetry
• Truth

“What the will helps to fabricate the will can help to destroy.”

Asserting that consciously made mental forms remain subject to choice · Essay, A Sixty-Drop Dose of Laudanum, Drop 20

• Hope
• Truth

“The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.”

Suggests that discovery sometimes requires surrendering excessive control · Essay, Circles (1841)

• Hope
• Truth

“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”

Defending open investigation as a test that truth can withstand · The Age of Reason

• Courage
• Reason
• Truth

“The poet must be above all things a man of the world.”

Linking poetic insight with broad human and historical awareness · Essay / prose statement on poetry

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“Symbolism, as seen in the writers of our day, would have no value if it were not seen also, under one disguise or another, in every great imaginative writer.”

His insistence that symbolism is an old impulse, not a new invention · The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 1899

• Art
• Truth

“A critic should judge a writer only through an idea of the writer's success or failure in the road which the writer has set out for himself.”

Stating that criticism should measure a writer against chosen aims · Introduction to Giants and Dwarves, 1946

• Art
• Truth

“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

Presenting moral character as a lasting form of wealth · Walden

• Beauty
• Hope
• Truth

“The spirit which advocates the lawless labor injunction is the same essential spirit which animates the mob.”

Equating institutional lawlessness with the disorder it claims to restrain · Essay, The New Star Chamber, 1904

• Justice
• Truth

“The human voice—what a wonder and mystery it is!”

Expressing his fascination with the expressive and mysterious power of the human voice · Mearing Stones, The Human Voice

• Art
• Music
• Truth

“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

“The same principle lives in us all.”

Emphasising the shared humanity underlying the struggle for liberty · Letter to Samson Occom, 1774

• Faith
• Freedom
• Truth

“It is often healthy, relieving and searching to write a vicious satire, diatribe or philippic, despite the fact that one may be partly wrong.”

Defending fierce satire as a useful form of inquiry · Introduction to Giants and Dwarves, 1946

• Art
• Truth

“I do not remember a scholar—scarcely a dunce. No one was an expert, even in crime.”

Wryly portraying an undistinguished but peaceable village · Autobiographical fragment, Chapter III (published posthumously, 1877)

• Society
• Truth

“It is not the excess, but the imperfection of love that ever makes it selfish.”

Suggesting that selfishness reveals incomplete rather than excessive love · Notes enclosed with a letter, 6 November 1856

• Love
• Truth

“You speak out, you,—I only make men and women speak—give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.”

A striking description of his dramatic method of revealing truth through imagined voices · Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, 13 January 1845

• Poetry
• Style
• Truth

“Millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

Reflecting on the recurring cycles of public fascination · Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, preface

• Fame
• Truth

“This is the lesson which may be read, alike in the bright track of the stars, and in the dusty course of the poorest thing that drags its tiny length upon the ground.”

Finding a common moral lesson throughout the natural world · Speech, 7 February 1842

• Nature
• Truth