The pleasure which strikes the soul must be derived from the beauty and congruity it sees or conceives in those things which the sight or imagination lay before it. Cervantes.
The pleasures of the world are deceitful; they promise more than they give. They trouble us in seeking them, they do not satisfy us when possessing them, and they make us despair in losing them. Mme. de Lambert.
The plenty of the poorest place is too great; 10 the harvest cannot be gathered. Emerson.
The poet bestrides the clouds, the wise man looks up at them. Arliss.
The poet can never have far to seek for a subject; for him the ideal world is not remote from the actual, but under it and within it; and he is a poet precisely because he can discern it there. Carlyle.
The poet must believe in his poetry. The fault of our popular poetry is that it is not sincere. Emerson.
The poet must find all within himself while he is left in the lurch by all without. Goethe.
The poet must live wholly for himself, wholly 15 in the objects that delight him. Goethe.
The poet should seize the particular, and he should, if there is anything sound in it, thus represent the universal. Goethe.
The poet's delicate ear hears the far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them. Holmes.