'The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first, Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd.'

'The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.'

- Poet Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

'In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.'

-Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

'All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.'

- "The Lord of the Rings" author JRR Tolkien (1892-1973)

A quote by Florence Nightingale

"Poetry and imagination begin life."

'Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.'

- Artist Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)

'The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.'

- Marine biologist and environmentalist Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

'Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.'

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

'Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.'

- Author James Joyce (1882 -1941)

'On the return trip home, gazing through 240,000 miles of space toward the stars and the planet from which I had come, I suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious..'

-Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, in "The Way of the Explorer"

William Blake may be best known as a poet, but he was also a painter

The author of "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" was a romantic poet and painter. "Newton," one of his better-known pieces, satirizes Isaac Newton, whom he saw as too concerned with the empiricism of science and, as a result, lacking an understanding of nature.

'It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.'

- Author Malcolm Gladwell (1963 - present)

'Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.'

- Maya Angelou

Allen Ginsberg on how Walt Whitman changed poetry

In this 1992 appearance on "Charlie Rose," Beat Generation icon Ginsberg articulates why Whitman mattered not only to the Beats but to all of poetry, arguing that he forever changed the possibilities of the form.

Walt Whitman's lost novel

In 2016, a long-forgotten piece of Walt Whitman's earliest work was uncovered. First published anonymously in 1852, "Life and Adventures of Jack Engle" is a serialized story that predates "Leaves of Grass." It offers a rare look at Whitman's early writing, before he became one of the most influential poets in US history.

Romantics sought to experience 'the sublime'

“Sublime” may be a word that’s still used in popular culture, but when Irish philosopher Edmund Burke used it in a 1757 essay, he was attempting to define an astonishment at something that was beyond full human understanding.

A quote by scientist Nikola Tesla

"The scientific man does not aim at an immediate result ... His duty is to lay the foundation for those who are to come, and point the way."

'There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.'

- Writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

'If the time is not ripe, we have to ripen the time.'

- Activist Dorothy Height (1912-2010)

'Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember it.'

- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Author David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' speech provides guidance for adulthood

Science is rarely a linear progression of understanding

Particularly at the frontiers, investigations conducted based on established knowledge can provide unexpected results. This opens the door to revising existing models, inspiring new lines of research, and ultimately leading to better future comprehension. For instance, experiments on the speed of light and the expansion of the universe yielded then-confusing data that led to revolutionary insights.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

Busting the myths about Thoreau's 'Walden'

This resource from The Walden Woods Project dispels some of the common myths about Thoreau's time in the woods, including that he was a hermit (he actually regularly visited friends), that he was freeloading (he paid off his debts), that "Walden" was a misrepresentation (he was forthcoming about editing his experiences), and that he was opposed to progress (he believed in practical technology).

'The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.'

- Mark Twain, from "Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales"

An animation illustrating the enormity of the universe

Look around you. Where are you? Where is this place you are occupying? Somewhere in a room, maybe in a city on a continent on a planet orbiting a star in a galaxy among billions. But… where is all of that?

The petty ancient Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus

Classics with a capital "C" probably doesn't bring to mind erotically charged diss poetry. Gaius Valerius Catullus would like to change that. Instead of mythical epics, Catullus wrote poetry about his personal life as part of the 1st century BCE's "new wave" of Roman poets embracing the lyrical and everyday. The focus of his poetic work ranges from serenades to spiteful insults.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

The original copy of the Declaration of Independence is not a pristine document, and even features a smudged anonymous handprint in the bottom left corner.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

All rainbows are 'raincircles' caused by water droplets separating white sunlight into a spectrum of colors, but Earth's surface blocks the bottom half of the circle from our line of sight.

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Most of the observable universe's volume consists of voids and supervoids—enormous regions of space with little to no galaxies, stars, or light.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

Waves off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, can reach over 100 feet and are caused by the area's deep underwater canyon geography

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

This poison ivy knowledge quiz—accompanied by photos of the plant's varied forms—may help you identify this common rash-inducing growth.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.