Government has no rights; it is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their own. It is therefore just, only so far as it exists by their consent, useful only so far as it operates to their well-being.

Love! dearest, sweetest power! how much are we indebted to thee! How much superior are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources!

This, and no other, is justice: — to consider, under all the circumstances and consequences of a particular case, how the greatest quantity and purest quality of happiness will ensue from any action ... there is no other justice.

Gold is a living god and rules in scorn,

All earthly things but virtue.

Away, away, from men and towns,

To the wild wood and the downs —

To the silent wilderness

Where the soul need not repress

Its music lest it should not find

An echo in another’s mind.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds. His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.

My father Time is weak and gray

With waiting for a better day;

See how idiot-like he stands,

Fumbling with his palsied hands!

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

Until Death tramples it to fragments.

Thy words are like a cloud of winged snakes.

The body is placed under the earth, and after a certain period there remains no vestige even of its form. This is that contemplation of inexhaustible melancholy, whose shadow eclipses the brightness of the world. The common observer is struck with dejection of the spectacle. He contends in vain against the persuasion of the grave, that the dead indeed cease to be. The corpse at his feet is prophetic of his own destiny. Those who have preceded him, and whose voice was delightful to his ear; whose touch met his like sweet and subtle fire: whose aspect spread a visionary light upon his path — these he cannot meet again.

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

This is Heaven, when pain and evil cease, and when the Benignant Principle, untrammelled and uncontrolled, visits in the fulness of its power the universal frame of things. Human life, with all its unreal ills and transitory hopes, is as a dream, which departs before the dawn, leaving no trace of its evanescent lines.

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

Man, who wert once a despot and a slave,

A dupe and a deceiver! a decay,

A traveller from the cradle to the grave

Through the dim night of this immortal day.

I have drunken deep of joy,

And I will taste no other wine tonight.

To know nor faith, nor love, nor law, to be

Omnipotent but friendless, is to reign.

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.

Heaven's ebon vault,

Studded with stars unutterably bright,

Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,

Seems like a canopy which love has spread

To curtain her sleeping world.

Mankind, transmitting from generation to generation the legacy of accumulated vengeances, and pursuing with the feelings of duty the misery of their fellow-beings, have not failed to attribute to the Universal Cause a character analogous with their own. The image of this invisible, mysterious Being is more or less excellent and perfect — resembles more or less its original — in proportion to the perfection of the mind on which it is impressed.

I know the cause of all human disappointment -- worldly prejudice.

Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

That to divide is not to take away.

Love is like understanding, that grows bright,

Gazing on many truths; 'tis like thy light,

Imagination! which from earth and sky,

And from the depths of human phantasy,

As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills

The Universe with glorious beams, and kills

Error, the worm, with many a sun-like arrow

Of its reverberated lightning.

You would not easily guess

All the modes of distress

Which torture the tenants of earth;

And the various evils,

Which like so many devils,

Attend the poor souls from their birth.

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.

The encomium of one incapable of flattery is indeed flattering.

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

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.