What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it.

Those forms we fancy shadows, those strange lights That flash on dank morasses, the quick wind That smites us by the roadside—are the Night's Innumerable children. Unconfined By shroud or coffin, disembodied souls, Uneasy spirits, steal into the air From festering graveyards when the curfew tolls At the day's death... And wheresoever murders have been done, In stately palaces or lonesome woods, Where'er a soul has sold itself and lost Its high inheritance, there, hovering, broods Some sad, invisible, accurséd Ghost!