The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?
In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
The being called God…bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.
No more let life divide what death can join together.
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
O weep for Adonis – He is dead.” “Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep – he hath wakened from the dream of life
I have drunken deep of joy,And I will taste no other wine tonight.
I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted
And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.
Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
We look before and after,And pine for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.
Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.
And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit’s knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay
Joy, joy, joy!Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,And the future is dark, and the present is spread,Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,Yet let’s be merry; we’ll have tea and toast;Custards for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries.
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.
IF [GOD] HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?
There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman….
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law.
Equality in possessions must be the last result of the utmost refinements of civilization; it is one of the conditions of that system of society towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate success, it is our duty to tend.
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate’er it touches, and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanised automaton.
It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a Being beyond its limits capable of creating it.
As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair so an unsuccessful author turns critic.
First our pleasures die – and then Our hopes and then our fears – and when These are dead the debt is due Dust claims dust – and we die too.
Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.
I have drunken deep of joy And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert That from Heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
January grey is here Like a sexton by her grave February bears the bier March with grief doth howl and rave And April weeps – but O ye hours! Follow with May’s fairest flowers.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the moon.
How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mold a pin or fabricate a nail!
I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.
Reason respects the differences and imagination the similitudes of things.
Man who man would be must rule the empire of himself.
Man who man would be must rule the empire of himself.
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
How many a rustic Milton has passed by Stifling the speechless longings of his heart In unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies no longer tameless then To mould a pin or fabricate a nail!
O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.