That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
That which you mistake for madness is but an overacuteness of the senses.
He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness is no comfortable feeling.
A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
Even for those to whom life and death are equal jests. There are some things that are still held in respect.
Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.
When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect – they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart.
The result of law inviolate is perfection–right–negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain.
No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul.
Lord help my poor soul.
A man’s grammar, like Caesar’s wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of golden sand- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep- while I weep!
But our love was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we Of many far wiser than we And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
To be thoroughly conversant with Man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of Despair.
Perversity is the human thirst for self-torture.
Every moment of the night Forever changing places And they put out the star-light With the breath from their pale faces.
Blood was its Avatar and its seal.
In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream – an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.
We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many Colored Grass.