If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise...

Certaines choses que Napoléon dit des femmes, plusieurs discussiions sur le mérite des romans à la mode sous son règne lui donnèrent alors, pour la première fois, quelques idées que tout autre jeune home de...

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promise of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines...

There is no single thing… that is so cut and dried that one cannot attend to its secret whisper which says ‘I am more than just my appearance’. If each object quivers with readiness to...

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the...

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of...

Porn mainly exists to satisfy the physical needs of men. Unfortunately many young men use porn to get educated about sex. But porn is not romance, lovemaking and about an emotional connection with their girlfriend,...

gentleman and soldier.” However conscious it may have been, there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional. Nor do I doubt that its purpose is to shelter...

A true romantic will break the rules for the right reasons. He will not conform to the ideals bestowed upon him by society. Instead he will fight for a climate of freedom that allows him...

Negative Capacity, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

I receive your love and I give you mine. Not the love of a man for women, not the love of a father for a child, not the love of God for his creatures, but...

I see things in windows and I say to myself that I want them. I want them because I want to belong. I want to be liked by more people, I want to be held...

History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.

Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives

Recall what used to be the theme of poetry in the romantic era. In neat verses the poet lets us share his private, bourgeois emotions: his sufferings great and small, his nostalgias, his religious or...

[H]e initially conceived of Olivier as a man of the greatest promise destroyed by a fatal flaw, the unreasoning passion for a woman dissolving into violence, desperately weakening everything he tried to do. For how...

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them — are ruinous!

Ah youth, youth! That’s what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare

He is in love with the land that is always over the next hill and the next, with the bird that is never, Caught, with the room beyond the looking glass. He likes the half-hid,...

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again —

And secretly I fell prey to the one of the besetting sins of western intellectuals, which normally I abhor: I began to experience envy of suffering, that profoundly dishonest emotion which derives from the foolish...

Energy was the ruling theme of Victorian science, as machines increasingly harnessed the forces of nature to do man’s work. The concept is also present in the art and literature of the age, notably in...

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of...

She seemed like the kind of woman who would fall in love with the sky.

Romanticism embodied “a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for...

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...

Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what’s desirable with equal intensity, suffering our lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread.

Aaron snorted “That’s so cheesy.””Well yeah. I am cheesy. I’m the king of cheese. You should know that by now.Aaron’s eyes were dancing with amusement. “I prefer to call you classically romantic.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in...

If we truly detach from our childhood and abandon our inherent romanticism, then we shred any bit of humanity left in us.

Men, I still think, ought to be weighed, not counted. Their worth ought to be the final estimate of their value.

I went up on the hill and walked about until twilight had deepened into an autumn night with a benediction of starry quietude over it. I was alone but not lonely. I was a queen...

On a cloudy night, when nothing seems above, still, there is love. Always love. For something, from someone. It’s never done. Never.

We know from accounts of Rilke’s life that his stay in Rodin’s workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet’s view of the mutilated body thus...

I fancy my father thought me an odd child, and had little fondness for me; though he was very careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent’s duties. But he was already past the...

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!

They wanted so desperately to love each other more, to remove their clothes and submit their naked bodies to each other, but it was almost as if they were cursed since the first day that...

Upon the publication of Goethe’s epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward...

Some people call me sick and twisted. I feel that I’m neither; I am instead a Romantic.

(visions) of strange cities, of sandy plains, of gigantic ruins, of midnight skies with strange bright constellations, of mountain-passes, of grassy nooks flecked with the afternoon sunshine through the boughs: I was in the midst...

Fall in lovewith the energyof the morningstrace your fingers along the lullof the afternoonstake the spirit of the eveningsin your armskiss it deeply and thenmake loveto the tranquilityof the nights.

I set about seeking a thread, a theme, a style, in the realm of legend. Something that might allow me to give free rein to my juvenile sense of romanticism and the beautiful image.

Io non sono un tipo da cuori e fiori, non ho niente di romantico, ho gusti molto particolari. Dovresti stare alla larga da me.Ma in te, in te c’è qualcosa, per cui non riesco a...

I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I’d seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as...

I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some...

As sometimes happens with men who wish to fight but do not or cannot, Reagan developed a romantic image of the military.

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world – there I am a child – there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance – I...

When you fall in love, you land on a cloud.