I like his holiness very much, particularly since an order, which I understand he has lately given, that no more miracles shall be performed. |
I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me; and to me / High mountains are a feeling, but the hum / Of human cities torture. |
I loathe that low vice curiosity |
I love not man the less, but Nature more. |
I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone. |
I really cannot know whether I am or am not the Genius you are pleased to call me, but I am very willing to put up with the mistake, if it be one. It is a title dearly enough bought by most men, to render it endurable, even when not quite clearly made out, which it never can be till the Posterity, whose decisions are merely dreams to ourselves, has sanctioned or denied it, while it can touch us no further. |
I see before me the Gladiator lie: / He leans upon his hand - his manly brow / Consents to death, but conquers agony. |
I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five? |
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail. |
I should like to know who has been carried off, except poor dear me -- I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war. |
I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law; and, even then, if I could have been certain to haunt her - but I won't dwell upon these trifling family matters |
I stood / Among them, but not of them; in a shroud / Of thoughts which were not their thoughts. |
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs; / A palace and a prison on each hand. |
I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring. |
I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in 20 minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it. |