Poetry should only occupy the idle.

Our thoughts take the wildest flight: Even at the moment when they should arrange themselves in thoughtful order.

The busy have no time for tears.

Alas! how deeply painful is all payment!

Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt / In solitude, where we are least alone.

Society is smoothed to that excess, that manners hardly differ more than dress

Sublime tobacco! which from east to west Cheers the tar’s labor or the Turkman’s rest

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

Oh! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,/ With one fair Spirit for my minister, / That I might all forget the human race, / And, hating no one, love but only her!

Cool, and quite English, imperturbable.

All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Where’er we tread ’tis haunted, holy ground.

It is true from early habit, one must make love mechanically as one swims; I was once very fond of both, but now as I never swim unless I tumble into the water, I don’t...

He left a Corsair’s name to other times, / Linked with one virtue, and a thousand crimes.

Dreading that climax of all human ills, / The inflammation of his weekly bills.

She / Was married, charming, chaste, and twenty-three.

Truth is always strange

But who forgives the senior’s ceaseless verse, / Whose hairs grow hoary as his rhymes grow worse?

Indigestion is – that inward fate which makes all Styx through one small liver flow

There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

An old man / With an old soul, and both extremely blind.

Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure — critics all are ready made.

Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear

A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust

But Tom’s no more – and so no more of Tom.

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

The castle crag of Drachenfels / Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine.

Still must I hear? – shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl / His creaking couplets in a tavern hall, / And I not sing?

In solitude, where we are least alone.

The simple Wordsworth . . . / Who, both by precept and example, shows / That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.

Passion is the element in which we live; without it, we hardly vegetate.

Lovers may be — and indeed generally are — enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.

Prolonged endurance tames the bold.

Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

May none these marks efface! / For they appeal from tyranny to God.

It has been said that the immortality of the soul is a ”grand peut-”tre” –but still it is a grand one. Everybody clings to it –the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is...

Talent may be in time forgiven, but genius never

No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!

The Angels were all singing out of tune, and hoarse with having little else to do, excepting to wind up the sun and moon or curb a runaway young star or two.

I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone.

Think not I am what I appear.

He possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence; courage without ferocity; and all the virtues of man without his vices

I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such...

Maidens like moths, are ever caught by glare, And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair

O gold! I still prefer thee unto paper which makes bank credit like a bank of vapor

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast, Is that portentous phrase, ‘I told you so

Even I / Regained my freedom with a sigh.

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.