A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.
All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.
I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.
I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement. But all excitements are, through a psychal necessity, transient.
I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.
It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.
It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.
It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
Man’s real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.
The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.
The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.
The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.
There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.
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.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
We loved with a love that was more than love.
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
