"O weep for Adonis - He is dead.' 'Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep - he hath wakened from the dream of life."

"No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure."

"I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to something afarFrom the sphere of our sorrow?"

"Soul meets soul on lovers' lips."

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

"When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even."

"Confound the subtlety of lawyers with the subtlety of the law."

"The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place."

"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."

"Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon."

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought."

"Before we aspire after theoretical perfection in the amelioration of our political state, it is necessary that we possess those advantages which we have been cheated of, and which the experience of modern times has proved that nations even under the present conditions are susceptible."

"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."

"He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined."

"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds."

"Sonnet: Political GreatnessNor happiness, nor majesty, nor fame,Nor peace, nor strength, nor skill in arms or arts,Shepherd those herds whom tyranny makes tame;Verse echoes not one beating of their hearts,History is but the shadow of their shame,Art veils her glass, or from the pageant startsAs to oblivion their blind millions fleet,Staining that Heaven with obscene imageryOf their own likeness. What are numbers knitBy force or custom? Man who man would be,Must rule the empire of himself; in itMust be supreme, establishing his throneOn vanquished will, quelling the anarchyOf hopes and fears, being himself alone."

"O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

"That orbed maiden with white fire laden Whom mortals call the moon."

"No more let life divide what death can join together."

"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."

"When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem."

"Fear not for the future, weep not for the past."

"Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

"Man's yesterday may never be like his morrow; Nought may endure but Mutability."

"What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered and our infancy remembered but in fragments. We live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being. Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance of ourselves, and this is much."

"The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys."

"Alas! this is not what I thought life was.I knew that there were crimes and evil men,Misery and hate; nor did I hope to passUntouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.In mine own heart I saw as in a glassThe hearts of others ... And whenI went among my kind, with triple brassOf calm endurance my weak breast I armed,To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woeful mass!"

"It is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a Being beyond its limits capable of creating it."

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

"Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert That from Heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

"January grey is here Like a sexton by her grave February bears the bier March with grief doth howl and rave And April weeps - but O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers."

"Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain."

"I have drunken deep of joy, And I will taste no other wine tonight."

"Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies."

"And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

"God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; he is contained under every predicate in non that the logic of ignorance could fabricate."

"All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil."

"When soul meets soul on lovers' lips."

"The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."

"And I have fitted up some chambers thereLooking towards the golden Eastern air,And level with the living winds, which flowLike waves above the living waves below.-I have sent books and music there, and allThose instruments with which high spirits callThe future from its cradle, and the pastOut of its grave, and make the present lastIn thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot die,Folded within their own eternity."

"There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone."

"Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted."

"History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man."

"Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret."

"Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast;Custards for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries."

"Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves."

"Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things."

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

"There is no real wealth but the labor of man."