“A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this – that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made – not to understand – but to feel – as crime.”

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

“And all I loved, I loved alone.”

“And so being young and dipped in folly, I fell in love with melancholy.”

“Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

“Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.”

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.”

“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”

“I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.”

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

“I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.”

“I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.”

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”

“I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it.”

“I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.”

“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”

“I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.”

“I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.”

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”

“I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.”

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

“In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.”

“Invisible things are the only realities.”

“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”

“It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.”

“It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”

“Lord, help my poor soul.”

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”

“Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.”

“Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.”

“Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”

“Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”

“Stupidity is a talent for misconception.”

“That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.”

“That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.”

“The best things in life make you sweaty.”

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

“The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.”

“The generous Critic fann’d the Poet’s fire, And taught the world with reason to admire.”

“The ninety and nine are with dreams, content but the hope of the world made new, is the hundredth man who is grimly bent on making those dreams come true.”

“The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

“The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.”

“The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls.”

“The true genius shudders at incompleteness –  imperfection – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.”

“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.”

“There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.”

“There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

“To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.”

“To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”

“We loved with a love that was more than love.”

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’”

“With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.”

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

“Years of love have been forgot, In the hatred of a minute.”