We are apt to think that our ideas and feelings are our own, and feel a sort of pride in them; but these we have been long accumulating, borrowing, stealing from the great store of the world's knowledge, and they are really the outcome of thousands of years of thought.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

The task of the excellent poet is not to say the things that can be said about nightingales, but to say something that has never been said about anything.

The task, then, is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.