We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Hell is a city much like London A populous and smoky city.
All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet.
A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.
There is a harmony In autumn, and a luster in its sky...
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery.
His fine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man’s face. I now Say what I think.
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.
It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen.
The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.
By all that is sacred in our hope for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system!
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.
It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
A lovely lady, garmented in light From her own beauty.
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!