“Poetry is a counterfeit creation, and makes things that are not, as though they were.”

Humiliation is the beginning of sanctification.

More than kisses, letters mingle souls.

How imperfect is all our knowledge!

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies.

Take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Love is strong as death; but nothing else is as strong as either; and both, love and death, met in Christ. How strong and powerful upon you, then, should that instruction be, that comes to you from both these, the love and death of Jesus Christ!

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

Our critical day is not the very day of our death; but the whole course of our life.

Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy jail.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.

I count all that part of my life lost which I spent not in communion with God, or in doing good.

No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.

Any asshole can chase a skirt, art takes discipline.

My art is capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the practical, rational world.

Thank you for the tragedy. I need it for my art.

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

I’ve always wanted to make a career in the arts, and I think that my only hope at doing that is to make it more about the work.

I enjoy singing my songs in front of people. I enjoy being involved in making the artwork for albums and stupid stuff like that.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.