“I rejoiced in my progress, mourned my weaknesses, and commiserated the universal instability of human conduct.”

I desire that death find me ready and writing, or if it please Christ, praying and intears.

Hope is incredible to the slave of grief.

And I live on, but in grief and self-contempt, Left here without the light I loved so much, In a great tempest and with shrouds unkempt.

When the poet died his cat was put to death and mummified.

Often on earth the gentlest heart is fain To feed and banquet on another’s woe.

Hitherto your eyes have been darkened and you have looked too much, yes, far too much, upon the things of earth. If these so much delight you what shall be your rapture when you lift your gaze to things eternal!

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

Go, grieving rimes of mine, to that hard stone Whereunder lies my darling, lies my dear, And cry to her to speak from heaven’s sphere.

A short cut to riches is to subtract from our desires.

For style beyond the genius never dares.

Sameness is the mother of disgust, variety the cure.

Death had his grudge against me, and he got up in the way, like an armed robber, with a pike in his hand.

To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost every one is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds.

Mere elegance of language can produce at best but an empty renown.

Alack our life, so beautiful to see, With how much ease life losest, in a day, What many years with pain and toil amassed!

To be able to say how much love, is love but little.

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life.

They truly mourn, that mourn without a witness.

It should be my right to mourn someone who has yet to leave this world but no longer wants to be part of mine.

A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.

Death ends our woes, and the kind grave shuts up the mournful scene.

If you want him to mourn, you had best leave him nothing.

How do you mourn the loss of someone who was never yours to begin with?

What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?