The only means of strengthening one's intelligence is to make up one's mind about nothing-- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Here lies one whose name was writ on water.