“Create yourself. Be yourself your poem.”

“Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”

“Let me be dressed as I will, yet flies worms and flowers exceed me still.”

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

“Land of Heart's Desire Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.”

“Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?”

“How much better when the whole land is a garden, and the people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise.”

“The weary sun hath made a golden setAnd by the bright tract of his fiery carGives token of a goodly day to-morrow.”

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

“Even through the hollow eyes of deathI spy life peering.”

“Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savagery aside, have done like offices of pity.”

“We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.”

“It is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love.”

“I would with such perfection govern, sir,T'excel the golden age.”

“I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.”

“I wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults overthe moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.”

“To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.”

“But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, Leaving no tract behind.”

“The Good Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and boys were now drilled in Greek, Latin, and Mathematics, it had quite left these shells high on the beach, and was creating and feeding other matters [science] at other ends of the world.”

“What's the news?None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest,Then is doomsday near.”

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”

“I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.”