“Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.”

If a person’s religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless.

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.

When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindu, his best friends hear no more of him.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

This lake exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty.

Are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar?

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion, and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.

Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.

I love tranquil solitude.

Life and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are struck with admiration at some of its transient modifications, but it is itself the great miracle.

Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

I do not believe in my death.

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don’t have executions.

You may be gone but you’re never over.

If a man should wanton walk with crime, he shall find in death no great deliverance.

Life is a misery, death an uncertainty.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.