As long as skies are blue, and fields are green Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow.
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
Love is free; to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed; such a vow in both cases excludes us from all inquiry.
The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.
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.
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.
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.
In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?
Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame.
The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom – Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings.
Sounds of vernal showers On the twinkling grass, Rain awaken’d flowers, All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!
For love and beauty and delight, there is no death nor change.
God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate.
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.