No one should brave the underworld alone.
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Who cares how time advances? I am drinking ale today.
The past is a pebble in my shoe.
Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore...
Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
Once upon a midnight dreary.
The rain came down upon my head – Unshelter’d. And the wind rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability.
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.