Love, the one supreme, unceasing source of human felicity, the one sole joy which lifts the whole mortal existence into the empyrean, was by it [Christianity] degraded into the mere mechanical action of reproduction.

Genius cannot escape the taint of its time more than a child the influence of its begetting.

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look round them.

Death! It is rest to the aged, it is oblivion to the atheist, it is immortality to the poet!

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told.