“I know I am–that simplest bliss The millions of my brothers miss. I know the fortune to be born, Even to the meanest wretch they scorn.”

So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.

Love’s humility is love’s true pride.

The hollows are heavy and dank With the steam of the Goldenrods.

He teaches best, Who feels the hearts of all men in his breast, And knows their strength or weakness through his own.

Women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse.

The healing of the world is in its nameless saints. Each separate star seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars break up the night and make it beautiful.

Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standeth Stern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,– Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,– Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top.

But who will watch my lilies, When their blossoms open white? By day the sun shall be sentry, And the moon and the stars by night!

Swelling in anger or sparkling in glee.

We follow and race In shifting chase, Over the boundless ocean-space! Who hath beheld when the race begun? Who shall behold it run?

Those who would attain to any marked degree of excellence in a chosen pursuit must work, and work hard for it, prince or peasant.

Really,’ thought I, ‘we call Baltimore the ‘Monumental City’ for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!

Departed suns their trails of splendor drew Across departed summers: whispers came From voices, long ago resolved again Into the primeval Silence, and we twain, Ghosts of our present selves, yet still the same, As in a spectral mirror wandered there.

Fame is what you have taken, / Character’s what you give; / When to this truth you waken, / Then you begin to live.

And rest, that strengthens unto virtuous deeds, Is one with Prayer.

The glories of the possible are ours.

We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

Past dreams of bliss our lives contain, And slight the chords that still retain A heart estranged to joys again,

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

Through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula.

This does not mean that feeling good or experiencing love and bliss is a bad thing. Given the choice, anyone would choose to feel bliss rather than sorrow.

It is not the pursuit of greater and greater states of happiness and bliss that leads to enlightenment, but the yearning for Reality and the rabid dissatisfaction with living anything less than a fully authentic life.

Reality is always true to itself. When you’re in harmony with it, you experience bliss. As soon as you are not in harmony with it, you experience pain. This is the law of the universe; it is the way things are. Nobody gets out of this law.

We may anticipate bliss, but who ever drank of that enchanted cup unalloved?