Samuel Taylor Quotes

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Oh worse than everything, is kindness counterfeiting absent love.

The once red leaf, the last of its clan, that dances as often as dance it can.

To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a racehorse on a treadmill.

Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

Why is it that so many of us persist in thinking that autumn is a sad season? Nature has merely fallen asleep, and her dreams must be beautiful if we are to judge by her countenance.

A savage place! As holy and enchanted/As e'er beneath the waning moon was haunted/By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!

No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor.

The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart, and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.

Those who best know human nature will acknowledge most fully what a strength light hearted nonsense give to a hard working man

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.

It is a gentle and affectionate thought, that in immeasurable height above us, at our first birth, the wreath of love was woven with sparkling stars for flowers.

Death but supplies the oil for the inextinguishable lamp of life.

Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole.

He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.

Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating the truth.

This world has angels all too few, and heaven is overflowing.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.

The blue and bright-eyed floweret of the brook, Hope's gentle gem, the sweet Forget-me-not.

A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

A nation to be great ought to be compressed in its increment by nations more civilized than itself.

Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.

A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be, And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields Shall be the incense I will yield to thee.

Our own heart, and not other men's opinion, forms our true honor.

To believe and to understand are not diverse things, but the same things in different periods of growth.

And in Life's noisiest hour, There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee, The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy. You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.

Blest hour! It was a luxury--to be!

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.

Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole, its body brevity, and wit its soul.

The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed.

I must reject fluids and ethers of all kinds, magnetical, electrical, and universal, to whatever quintessential thinness they may be treble distilled, and as it were super-substantiated.

Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

When the whole and the parts are seen at once, as mutually producing and explaining each other, as unity in multeity, there results shapeliness.

The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.

Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an atheist.

Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.