Boys and girls, And women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal.
I know the Bible is inspired because it finds me at greater depths of my being than any other book.
You do not believe, you only believe that you believe.
So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.
To all new truths, or renovation of old truths, it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the about-to-be renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath.
The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.
Men, I think, have to be weighed, not counted.
Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame.
Never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices.
A man’s desire is for the woman, but the woman’s desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake – Aye, what then?
There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth still below the horizon.
A man’s as old as he’s feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
Swans sing before they die – ’twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.