All Quotes

"Joy rises in me, like a summer's morn."

"Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, This lime-tree bower my prison!"

"When the last rook Beat its straight path along the dusky air"

"Tranquillity! thou better name Than all the family of Fame!"

"Aloof with hermit-eye I scan The present works of present man — A wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile, Too foolish for a tear, too wicked for a smile!"

"But the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love, The green fields below him, the blue sky above, That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he— 'I love my Love, and my Love loves me!'"

"What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit its soul."

"I could not know, Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame!"

"Trochee trips from long to short; From long to long in solemn sort Slow Spondee stalks."

"Iambics march from short to long;— With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng."

"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."

"And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you, How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you."

"I have heard of reasons manifold Why Love must needs be blind, But this the best of all I hold,— His eyes are in his mind.What outward form and feature are He guesseth but in part; But what within is good and fair He seeth with the heart."

"I stood in unimaginable trance And agony that cannot be remembered."

"The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors."

"The knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust; His soul is with the saints, I trust."

"Never, believe me, Appear the Immortals, Never alone."

"To know, to esteem, to love—and then to part, Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!"

"Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea."

"With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw."

"The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards."

"Verse, a Breeze 'mid blossoms straying, Where clung feeding, like a bee— Both were mine! Life went a-maying With , , and , When I was young!"

"Themes (superseded by :Category:Themes)"

"Literary works"

"Folk proverbs (superseded by :Category:Proverbs)"

"List of theatrical plays and musicals"

"List of television shows"

"Electronic games (superseded by :Category:Electronic games)"

"Famous last words"

"Famous tongue twisters"

"Mnemonics (replaced by Category:Mnemonics) deleted per VFD"

"I will be Chateaubriand or nothing."

"Behold, then, a new religion, a new society; upon this twofold foundation there must inevitably spring up a new poetry. Previously following therein the course pursued by the ancient polytheism and philosophy, the purely epic muse of the ancients had studied nature in only a single aspect, casting aside without pity almost everything in art which, in the world subjected to its imitation, had not relation to a certain type of beauty. A type which was magnificent at first, but, as always happens with everything systematic, became in later times false, trivial and conventional. Christianity leads poetry to the truth. Like it, the modern muse will see things in a higher and broader light. It will realize that everything in creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the unshapely beside the graceful, the grotesque on the reverse of the sublime, evil with good, darkness with light. It will ask itself if the narrow and relative sense of the artist should prevail over the infinite, absolute sense of the Creator; if it is for man to correct God; if a mutilated nature will be the more beautiful for the mutilation; if art has the right to duplicate, so to speak, man, life, creation; if things will progress better when their muscles and their vigour have been taken from them; if, in short, to be incomplete is the best way to be harmonious. Then it is that, with its eyes fixed upon events that are both laughable and redoubtable, and under the influence of that spirit of Christian melancholy and philosophical criticism which we described a moment ago, poetry will take a great step, a decisive step, a step which, like the upheaval of an earthquake, will change the whole face of the intellectual world. It will set about doing as nature does, mingling in its creations — but without confounding them — darkness and light, the grotesque and the sublime; in other words, the body and the soul, the beast and the intellect; for the starting-point of religion is always the starting-point of poetry. All things are connected. Thus, then, we see a principle unknown to the ancients, a new type, introduced in poetry; and as an additional element in anything modifies the whole of the thing, a new form of the art is developed. This type is the grotesque; its new form is comedy."

"Ces deux moitiés de Dieu, le pape et l'empereur!"

"Dieu s'est fait homme; soit. Le diable s'est fait femme!"

"La raison, c'est l'intelligence en exercice; l'imagination c'est l'intelligence en érection"

"Socialism, or the Red Republic, is all one; for it would tear down the tricolour and set up the red flag. It would make penny pieces out of the Column Vendome. It would knock down the statue of Napoleon and raise up that of Marat in its stead. It would suppress the Académie, the Ecole Polytechnique, and the Legion of Honour. To the grand device Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, it would add "Ou la mort. It would bring about a general bankruptcy. It would ruin the rich without enriching the poor. It would destroy labour, which gives to each one his bread. It would abolish property and family. It would march about with the heads of the proscribed on pikes, fill the prisons with the suspected, and empty them by massacres. It would convert France into the country of gloom. It would strangle liberty, stifle the arts, silence thought, and deny God. It would bring into action these two fatal machines, one of which never works without the other—the assignat press and the guillotine. In a word, it would do in cold blood what the men of 1793 did in fever, and after the grand horrors which our fathers saw, we should have the horrible in all that was low and small."

"Vous tenez à l’exemple [de la peine de mort]. Pourquoi? Pour ce qu’il enseigne. Que voulez-vous enseigner avec votre exemple? Qu’il ne faut pas tuer. Et comment enseignez-vous qu’il ne faut pas tuer? En tuant."

"Un jour viendra où il n'y aura plus d'autres champs de bataille que les marchés s'ouvrant au commerce et les esprits s'ouvrant aux idées. Un jour viendra où les boulets et les bombes seront remplacés par les votes, par le suffrage universel des peuples, par le vénérable arbitrage d'un grand sénat souverain qui sera à l'Europe ce que le parlement est à l'Angleterre, ce que la diète est à l'Allemagne, ce que l'assemblée législative est à la France! Un jour viendra où l'on montrera un canon dans les musées comme on y montre aujourd'hui un instrument de torture, en s'étonnant que cela ait pu être! Un jour viendra où l'on verra ces deux groupes immenses, les États-Unis d'Amérique, les États-Unis d'Europe, placés en face l'un de l'autre, se tendant la main par-dessus les mers, échangeant leurs produits, leur commerce, leur industrie, leurs arts, leurs génies, défrichant le globe, colonisant les déserts, améliorant la création sous le regard du créateur, et combinant ensemble, pour en tirer le bien-être de tous, ces deux forces infinies, la fraternité des hommes et la puissance de Dieu!"

"One can no more pray too much than love too much."

"Happy, even in anguish, is he to whom God has given a soul worthy of love and of grief!"

"The best way to worship God is to love your wife."

"To love or to have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life. To love is a consummation."

"Il y a maintenant en France dans chaque village un flambeau allumé, le maître d'école, et une bouche qui souffle dessus, le curé."

"Je n'entre qu'à moitié dans la guerre civile. Je veux bien y mourir, je ne veux pas y tuer."

"On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées."

"Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! Morne plaine!"

"L'œil était dans la tombe et regardait Caïn."

"Vous créez un frisson nouveau."

"Jésus a pleuré, Voltaire a souri; c’est de cette larme divine et de ce sourire humain qu’est faite la douceur de la civilisation actuelle."