“If a poem hasn’t ripped apart your soul; you haven’t experienced poetry.”

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Deep in earth my love is lying and I must weep alone.

And I fell violently on my face.

Art is to look at not to criticize.

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.

I have no faith in human perfectibility. 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.

Invisible things are the only realities.

Leave my loneliness unbroken.

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.

Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

Happiness is not to be found in knowledge, but in the acquisition of knowledge.

From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.

The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms.

Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.

Write me as if I were already a poem. Pen the stanzas as if storms and ships could birth something sacred. Color it a religious experience.

No one is born with self confidence. Self confidence is learned and earned with experience.

Managing the power of choice, with all it’s creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience.

We are all teachers, or should be. Anyone who relays experience to another person is a teacher. Not to transmit your experience is to betray it.

Worship is not an experience. Worship is an act, and this takes discipline. We are to worship ”in spirit and in truth.” Never mind about the feelings. We are to worship in spite of them.

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace & gratitude.

There are many reasons why Mitt Romney should not become president, but perhaps the most important of all is the narrowness of his experience, perspective and vision.