Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

Art degraded, Imagination denied.

How sweet I roamed from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, Till I the prince of love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide!

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

The world of imagination is the world of eternity. It is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated [i.e. mortal] body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.