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

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

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

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

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

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

First our pleasures die - and then our hopes, and then our fears - and when these are dead, the debt is due dust claims dust - and we die too.

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

All of us who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim.

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 is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

Death is the veil which those who live call life; They sleep, and it is lifted.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.