I have often thought what a melancholy world this would be without children, and what an inhuman world without the aged.
All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.
He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.
In your intercourse with sects, the sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the Church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is, or may be, collateral to them. Faith is subjective.
The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.
Of no agenor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.
The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope’s gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.
O let me be awake, my God! Or let me sleep alway.
Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.
I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remembered.
Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.
Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry .
Intellect really exists in its products; its kingdom is here.
A rogue is a roundabout fool.
The Earth with its scarred face is the symbol of the Past; the Air and Heaven, of Futurity.
If you wish to assured of the truth of Christianity, try it. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of thy belief.
A Gothic church is a petrified religion.
Clergymen who publish pious frauds in the interest of the church are the orthodox liars of God.