This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things.
We live and move and think; but we are not the creators of our own origin and existence. We are not the arbiters of every motion of our own complicated nature; we are not the masters of our own imaginations and moods of mental being.
Love’s very pain is sweet.
The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism.
My neighbour, or my servant, or my child, has done me an injury, and it is just that he should suffer an injury in return. Such is the doctrine which Jesus Christ summoned his whole resources of persuasion to oppose.
God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof; the onus probandi rests on the theist.
I have drunken deep of joy...
Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.
The same means that have supported every other popular belief have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, and falsehood; deeds of unexampled and incomparable atrocity have made it what it is.
We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece.
Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odors, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken.
A Christian, a Deist, a Turk, and a Jew, have equal rights: they are men and brethren.
O world! O life! O time! On whose last steps I climb.
Sow seed – but let no tyrant reap; Find wealth – let no imposter heap; Weave robes – let not the idle wear; Forge arms – in your defence to bear.
Yes, marriage is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequited fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies.
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart!
A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.
It is vain philosophy that supposes more causes than are exactly adequate to explain the phenomena of things.
The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven.
As I lay asleep in Italy There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me To walk in the visions of Poesy.