“One never knows whether the Poet is speaking fact, fancy, or allegory. If fancy is clever enough, I doubt that the Poet would admit a difference between fancy and fact.”

Commencement address at Michigan State University The New York Times (9 June 1958)
Context: You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

The Reason of Church Government (1641), Book II, Introduction

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Commencement address at Michigan State University The New York Times (9 June 1958)

Source: Moby-Dick

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter VIII, Economic Liberalism, p. 89.

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance
Context: Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me, though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric, when we speak of eminent virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a man or a company of men, plastic and permeable to principles, by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, kings, rich men, poets, who are not.
This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain.