The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own.
Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know, but leech-like to their fainting country cling, till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow, - a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field.
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.
So is Hope Changed for Despair-one laid upon the shelf, We take the other. Under heaven's high cope Fortune is god-all you endure and do Depends on circumstance as much as you.
A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which it distorts.
Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the heights of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire.
Whatever may be his true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution. This is the character of all life and being.
Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves.
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.
The practice of utter sincerity towards other men would avail to no good end, if they were incapable of practising it towards their own minds. In fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.