"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley)

""Ut haec ipsa qui non sentiat deorum vim habere is nihil omnino sensurus esse videatur."

"If any man cannot feel the power of God when he looks upon the stars, then I doubt whether he is capable of any feeling at all.""
— Quintus Horatius Flaccus

"The last thing he ever said to me was, 'Just always be waiting for me, and then some night you will hear me crowing.'"
— J.M. Barrie

"If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave."
— Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)

"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."
— George Gordon Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage)

"She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"A man leaves his great house because he's bored
With life at home, and suddenly returns,
Finding himself no happier abroad.
He rushes off to his villa driving like mad,
You'ld think he's going to a house on fire,
And yawns before he's put his foot inside,
Or falls asleep and seeks oblivion,
Or even rushes back to town again.
So each man flies from himself (vain hope, because
It clings to him the more closely against his will)
And hates himself because he is sick in mind
And does not know the cause of his disease."
— Titus Lucretius Carus

"Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.


"
— Andrew Marvell

"When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied? Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."
— William Makepeace Thackeray

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it. "
— Benjamin Disraeli

". . . Nature pulls one way and human nature another."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"Vera incessu patuit dea.
(The goddess indubitable was revealed in her step.)"
— Publius Vergilius Maro (The Aeneid)

"No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise."
— Charlotte Brontë (Villette)

"In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

""Why can't you fly now, mother?"
"Because I am grown up, dearest. When people grow up they forget the way."
"Why do they forget the way?"
"Because they are no longer gay and innocent and heartless. It is only the gay and innocent and heartless who can fly." "
— J.M. Barrie

"But the older he grew and the more intimately he came to know his brother, the oftener the thought occurred to him that the power of working for the general welfare – a power of which he felt himself entirely destitute – was not a virtue but rather a lack of something: not a lack of kindly honesty and noble desires and tastes, but a lack of the power of living, of what is called heart – the aspiration which makes a man choose one out of all the innumerable paths of life that present themselves, and desire that alone."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"So it goes."
— Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five)

"Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself."
— William Shakespeare (Henry VIII, The Folger LIbrary General Reader's Shakespeare)

"Countless words
count less
than the silent balance
between yin and yang"

(from Verse 5, Tao Te Ching, translated by Ralph Alan Dale, 2002)
"
— Lao Tzu

"And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved.” "
— Homer

"Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life."
— Thomas Hardy

"Rumours voiced by women come to nothing."
— Aeschylus (Agamemnon)

"Time, which sees all things, has found you out."
— Sophocles Oedipus The King

"Many a law, many a commandment have I broken, but my word never."
— Walter Scott

"It wasn't for a woman's backside that I took on this ordeal!"
— Cúchulainn (Thomas Kinsella, translator) (The Táin)

"When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true too . . . she was as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived."
— Frances Hodgson Burnett

"how wearisom
Eternity so spent in worship paid
To whom we hate. Let us not then pursue
By force impossible, by leave obtain'd
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp"
— John Milton