Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!
To hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air, The soul of her beauty and love lay bare.
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!
Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.
Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.
And priests dare babble of a God of peace, Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, Murdering the while, uprooting every germ Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making the earth a slaughter – house!
Design must be proved before a designer can be inferred.
Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.
Man’s yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure.
This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.