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.
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.
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.
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.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight.
Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.
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.
Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.
Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.
Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.
Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability.
