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How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

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Each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking, of less able minds--and then confidently embarks on making fresh errors of its own.

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A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

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There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

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Live simply that others might simply live.

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Happiness is a state of activity.

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One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

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The problem with intelligent design theory is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable: Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet--a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school

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The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

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Faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction--faith in fiction is a damnable false hope.

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