Great Throughts Treasury

"In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived."

"In friendships I had been most fortunate yet never saw I one whom I would call more willingly my friend."

"In each human heart terror survives the raven it has gorged: the loftiest fear all that they would disdain to think were true: hypocrisy and custom make their minds the faces of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man?s estate, and yet they know not that they do not dare."

"In an ocean of dreams without a sound."

"In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

"In the embrace of autumn."

"In the warm shadow of her loveliness;? He kissed her with his beams."

"In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet."

"Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker."

"It has been the persuasion of an immense majority of human beings in all ages and nations that we continue to live after death,?that apparent termination of all the functions of sensitive and intellectual existence. Nor has mankind been contented with supposing that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will remain perpetual and unchanged."

"It is a modest creed, and yet pleasant if one considers it, to own that death itself must be, like all the rest, a mockery."

"In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians."

"It is important to observe that the author of the Christian system had a conception widely differing from the gross imaginations of the vulgar relatively to the ruling Power of the universe. He everywhere represents this Power as something mysteriously and illimitably pervading the frame of things. Nor do his doctrines practically assume any proposition which they theoretically deny. They do not represent God as a limitless and inconceivable mystery; affirming, at the same time, his existence as a Being subject to passion..."

"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."

"It is probable that what we call thought is not an actual being, but no more than the relation between certain parts of that infinitely varied mass, of which the rest of the universe is composed, and which ceases to exist as soon as those parts change their position with regard to each other."

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower - and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

"Last came Anarchy: he rode on a white horse, splashed with blood; he was pale even to the lips, like Death in the Apocalypse."

"January gray 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."

"Jealousy's eyes are green."

"Kiss me, so long but as a kiss my live; and in my heartless breast and burning brain that word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive, with food of saddest memory kept alive."

"Let me set my mournful ditty to a merry measure; thou wilt never come for pity, thou wilt come for pleasure; pity then will cut away those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay."

"Let the blue sky overhead, the green earth on which ye tread, all that must eternal be witness the solemnity."

"Like wrecks of a dissolving dream."

"Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise! She knew not 'twas her own; as with no stain she faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain."

"Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, and feeds her grief."

"Love is like understanding, that grows bright, gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light, imagination! Which from earth and sky, and from the depths of human phantasy, as from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills the universe with glorious beams, and kills error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow of its reverberated lightning."

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

"Kings are like stars ? they rise and set, they have the worship of the world, but no repose."

"Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death."

"Like a glowworm golden, in a dell of dew, scattering unbeholden its aerial blue among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view."

"Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of Eternity, until Death tramples it to fragments."

"Like the young moon, When on the sunlit limits of the night Her white shell trembles amid crimson air, And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might, Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair."

"Me ? who am as a nerve o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of this earth, and was to thee the flame upon thy hearth, when all beside was cold: ? that thou on me shouldst rain these plagues of blistering agony!"

"Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!"

"Love's Pestilence, and her slow dogs of war."

"Love's very pain is sweet, but its reward is in the world divine which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave."

"Men must reap the things they sow, force from force must ever flow, or worse; but 'tis a bitter woe that love or reason cannot change."

"Man is of soul and body, formed for deeds Of high resolve; on fancy's boldest wing."

"Many faint with toil, that few may know the cares and woe of sloth."

"Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, my spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!"

"Many a green isle needs must be in the deep wide sea of Misery, or the mariner, worn and wan, never thus could voyage on."

"Love, from its awful throne of patient power in the wise heart, from the last giddy hour of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, and narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs and folds over the world its healing wings."

"Men of England, heirs of glory, heroes of unwritten story, nurslings of one mighty mother, hopes of her, and one another; rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number, shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you-ye are many ? they are few."

"Mild is the slow necessity of death; the tranquil spirit fails beneath its grasp, without a groan, almost without a fear, resigned in peace to the necessity; calm as a voyager to some distant land, and full of wonder, full of hope as he."

"Men of England, wherefore plough for the lords who lay ye low?"

"Most wretched men are cradled into poetry by wrong; they learn in suffering what they teach in song."

"Most musical of mourners, weep again!"

"Mind from its object differs most in this: evil from good; misery from happiness; the baser from the nobler; the impure and frail, from what is clear and must endure. If you divide suffering and dross, you may diminish till it is consumed away; if you divide pleasure and love and thought, each part exceeds the whole; and we know not how much, while any yet remains unshared, of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared: this truth is that deep well, whence sages draw the unenvied light of hope; the eternal law by which those live, to whom this world of life is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife tills for the promise of a later birth the wilderness of this elysian earth. Love's very pain is sweet, but its reward is in the world divine which, if not here, it builds beyond the grave."

"My father Time is weak and gray with waiting for a better day; see how idiot-like he stands, fumbling with his palsied hands!"

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"