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We explore our environment, more than we are compelled to utter poetry, when we're toddlers. We start doing that later. Before that happens, every child is a scientist.

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

Poets are born, not paid.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.

I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.