Silence is the essential condition of happiness.

From every Englishman emanates a kind of gas, the deadly choke-damp of boredom.

I have never seen an ass who talked like a human being, but I have met many human beings who talked like asses.

Man,--the aristocrat amongst the animals.

Perhaps already I am dead, And these perhaps are phantoms vain; - These motley phantasies that pass At night through my disordered brain. Perhaps with ancient heathen shapes, Old faded gods, this brain is full; Who, for their most unholy rites, Have chosen a dead poet's skull.

Round my cradle shimmered the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning rays of the nineteenth.

Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the most limited means.