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

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

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.

Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.

Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

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.

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

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

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

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

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.

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.

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

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

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

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

O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?