Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyForget the dead, the past? O yet there are ghosts that may take revenge for it, memories that make the heart a tomb, regrets which gild throโ the spiritโs gloom, and with ghastly whispers tell that joy, once lost, is pain.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyNo mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time.
Percy Bysshe Shelley