“You gave me the key to your heart, my love, then why did you make me knock?”

There are four questions of value in life, Don Octavio. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for and what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love.

Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only “like a youth Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth.”

I have not loved the world, nor the world me.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

I awoke one day to find myself famous.

O thou beautiful And unimaginable ether! and Ye multiplying masses of increased And still increasing lights! what are ye? what Is this blue wilderness of interminable Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.

I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some sequins in a drawer to count, and cry over them once a week.

Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull

A pretty woman is a welcome guest.

Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.

I stood among them, but not of them: in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.

If a man proves too clearly and convincingly to himself…that a tiger is an optical illusion–well, he will find out he is wrong.

Absence – that common cure of love.

Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.