18th-century Poet Quotes

Lord Byron

Novalis

William Wordsworth

Friedrich Hölderlin

Alphonse de Lamartine

Vittorio Alfieri

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!

So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom'd for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death.

Now as all the sciences are connected with each other, Philosophy is never completed. In a complete system of all the sciences will philosophy for the first time be made manifest.

And o'er them the lighthouse looked lovely as hope,—
That star of life's tremulous ocean.

Paul Moon James

How happily, how happily, the flowers die away!
Oh! Could we but return to earth as easily as they.

Caroline Anne Southey

Enter upon thy paths, O year!
Thy paths, which all who breathe must tread,
Which lead the Living to the Dead,
I enter; for it is my doom
To tread thy labyrinthine gloom;
To note who round me watch and wait;
To love a few; perhaps to hate;
And do all duties of my fate.

All books avoid, for they
Are the disgrace of our humanity,
And the assassins of the human race.
Mark well my words: the true
Philosophy consists in growing fat.

Giovanni Battista Lorenzi

It were a blessed sight to see That child become a willow tree, His brother trees among. He'd be four times as tall as me, And live three times as long.

Catherine Maria Fanshawe

The Lawyers may revere that tree
Where thieves so oft have swung,
Since, by the Law's most wise decree,
Her thieves are never hung.

Robert Fergusson

"Mortality", in Songs of Israel (1824). Abraham Lincoln was fond of repeating these lines.

This empire [Russia], vast as it is, is only a prison to which the emperor holds the key.

Marquis de Custine

There are some secrets which scarcely admit of being disclosed even to ourselves.

Should we miss but a tree where we used to be playing,
Or find the wood cut where we sauntered a-Maying,—
If the yew-seat's away, or the ivy's a-wanting,
We hate the fine lawn and the new-fashioned planting.
Each thing called improvement seems blackened with crimes,
If it tears up one record of blissful old times.

Susanna Blamire

And His that gentle voice we hear,
Soft as the breath of even.

Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.

What is man's love? His vows are broke even while his parting kiss is warm.

Fitz-Greene Halleck

Ma'm, architecture you're not skill'd in, I don't approve your way of building; In this there's nothing like design, Pray learn the use of Gunter's line.

Christopher Smart

Now spring returns; but not to me returns
The vernal joy my better years have known;
Dim in my breast life's dying taper burns,
And all the joys of life with health have flown.

Let those who feast at ease on dainty fare,
Pity the reapers, who their feasts prepare.

Dear Lord! while we adoring pay
Our humble thanks to Thee,
May every heart with rapture say,—
"The Saviour died for me!"

I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books.

Charlotte Dacre

Though in astronomy survey'd, His constant course was retrograde; O'er Newton's system though he sleeps, And finds his wits in dark eclipse!

What is the life of a man more than the life of a lamb, or any guiltless animal?

Don't kill!... The fly is asking you To save his life By rubbing his hands together

Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,—
Take, I give it willingly;
For, invisible to thee,
Spirits twain have crossed with me.