One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is Love.
-Sophocles
Shallow men believe in luck.
-Emerson
My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on;
Judge not the play before the play is done:
Her plot hath many changes; every day
Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play.
-Francis Quarles
What fates impose, that men must needs abide;
It boots not to resist both wind and tide.
-Shakespeare
One was never married, and that's his hell;
another is, And that's his plague.
-Rob Burton
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane,
Clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
-Thomas Hobbes
The magic of a face.
-Thomas Carew
He [Shakespeare] was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient
poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul.
-Dryden
The way you express your love of people is to give quality.
-Stanley Crouch
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and
the truth of imagination."
-John Keats
All love is sweet, Given or Returned.
Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now, but those who feed it most
Are happier still.
-Shelley
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time;
The articulate audible voice of the Past,
When the body and material substance of it has
Altogether vanished like a dream.
-Carlyle
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
-Shelley
An idea, in the highest sense of the word, cannot be conveyed
But by a symbol.
-Coleridge
Beware the fury of a patient man.
-Dryden
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity.
It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts,
And appear almost as a remembrance.
-Keats
I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and
The hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them
Both in the same minute.
-Keats [to Fanny Brawne]
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end,
burn Human beings.
-Heinrich Heine
Every woman is the gift of a world to me.
-Heinrich Heine
Mark this well, you proud men of action: you are nothing
But the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in
Quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings
In advance.
-Heinrich Heine
"Temptations can be got rid of." "How?"
"By yielding to them."
- Balzac
O bed! O bed! Delicious bed!
That heaven upon earth to the weary head.
-Thomas Hood
Oh! Poverty is a weary thing, 'tis full of grief and pain;
It keepeth down the soul of man, as with an iron chain.
-Mary Howitt
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom;
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home;
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.
-John Henry Cardinal Newman
Popularity? It is glory's small change.
-Victor Hugo
Few, save the poor, feel for the poor.
-Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society
Of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
-Emerson
We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.
-Emerson
Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend.
-Emerson
Time the consoler. Time the rich
Carrier of all changes, dries the freshest
Tears by obtruding new figures, new costumes,
New roads on our eye, new voices on our ear.
-Emerson
Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material
Force, that thoughts rule the world.
-Emerson
A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.
-Emerson
When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
-Emerson
Everything comes if a man, will only wait.
-Disraeli
Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.
-Friedrich Halm
A feeling of sadness and longing
That is not akin to pain.
-Longfellow
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
-Longfellow
Where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute,
Which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion
To test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
The Black Cat
-Poe
Can it be fancied that Deity ever vindictively
Made in his image a mannikin merely to madden it?
-Poe
What! Out of senseless Nothing to provoke
A conscious Something to resent the yoke?
-Edward Fitzgerald
A simple maiden in her flower
Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms.
-Tennyson
This is the truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
-Tennyson
O love, thy kiss would wake the dead!
-Tennyson
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
-Tennyson
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.
-Tennyson
Sweet is true love though given in vain, in vain;
And sweet is death who puts an end to pain.
-Tennyson
Truth never yet fell dead in the streets, it has such
Affinity with the soul of man
-Theodore Parker
Would you have your songs endure?
Build on the human heart.
-Robert Browning
Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
-Browning
Why stay we on the earth except to grow?
-Browning
Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature - daily to
Be shown matter, to come in contact with it - rocks, trees, wind
On our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world!
The
Common sense! Contact! Contact!
Who are we? Where Are we?
-Thoreau
Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some
Pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting
Sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly
As from the rich man's abode.
-Thoreau
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
-James Lowell
Taste is the only morality Tell me what you like,
and I'll tell you what you are.
-John Ruskin
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free
And own no superior?
-Whitman
War is at best barbarism Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those
Who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
Wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.
War is hell.
-William Sherman
Young blood doth not obey an old decree:
We cannot cross the cause why we were born.
-Shakespeare
To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the
Most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
-Henri-Frederic Amiel
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode
Of saying things, and hence its importance.
-Matthew Arnold
Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love,
interest, and Admiration.
-Matthew Arnold
Didn't the Founder say that the outcast is the free soul,
The child of God?
-Ursula Le Guin
That power which erring men call chance.
-John Milton
Every man meets his Waterloo at last.
-Wendell Philips