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Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Topic: Love
Source: None
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Blest hour! It was a luxury--to be!
Topic: Luxury
Source: Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement (l. 43)
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A man of maxims only, is like a cyclops with one eye, and that in the back of his head.
Topic: Maxim
Source: None
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He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
Topic: Medicine
Source: None
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It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
Topic: Merit
Source: Complaint
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He went like one that hath been stunn'd,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
Topic: Misfortune
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. VII, last stanza)
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The moving moon went up to the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.
Topic: Moon
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. IV)
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A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
Topic: Motherhood
Source: The Three Graves (st. 10)
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The mother says to her daughter: Daughter bid thy daughter, to
her daughter, that her daughter's daughter is crying.
[Lat., Mater ait natae die natae filia natum
Ut moneat natae plangere filiolam.]
Topic: Motherhood
Source: The Three Graves (st. 10)
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Iago's soliloquy--the motive-hunting of a motiveless
malignity--how awful it is!
Topic: Motive
Source: Shakespeare--Notes on Othello
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Ah! replied my gentle fair,
Beloved, what are names but air?
Choose thou, whatever suits the line:
Call me Sappho, call me Chloris,
Call me Lalage, or Doris,
Only, only, call me thine.
Topic: Names
Source: What's in a Name
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Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
Topic: Nature
Source: None
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"Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
Topic: Nightingales
Source: The Nightingale
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'Tis the merry nightingale
That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music!
Topic: Nightingales
Source: The Nightingale (l.43)
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Pity is best taught by fellowship in woe.
Topic: Pity
Source: None
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In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column:
In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.
Topic: Poetry
Source: The Ovidian Elegiac Metre
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Prose--words in their best order;--poetry--the best words in
their best order.
Topic: Poetry
Source: Table Talk
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Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.
Topic: Praise
Source: Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni (last line)
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He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small.
Topic: Prayer
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. VII)
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He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
Topic: Prayer
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. VII)
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The saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all.
Topic: Prayer
Source: Christabel (conclusion to pt. I)
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And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.
Topic: Pride
Source: None
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Ancestral voices prophesying war.
Topic: Prophecy (Prophesy)
Source: Kubla Khan
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Like one that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.
Topic: Pursuit
Source: None
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Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess which will itself need reforming.
Topic: Reform
Source: None
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Remorse is as the heart in which it grows;
If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews
Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy,
It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost,
Weeps only tears of poison.
Topic: Remorse
Source: Remorse (act I, sc. 1)
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O! lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
Topic: Results
Source: Dejection--An Ode (IV)
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That passage is what I call the sublime dashed to pieces by
cutting too close with the fiery four-in-hand round the corner of
nonsense.
Topic: Ridicule
Source: Table Talk
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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river ran,
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Topic: Rivers
Source: Kubla Khan
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Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sunthaw; whether the eve-drops fall,
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Of if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Topic: Seasons
Source: Frost at Midnight
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Our myriad-minded Shakespeare.
Topic: Shakespeare
Source: Biographia Literaria (ch. XV), borrowed from a Greek monk who had applied it to a Patriarch of Const
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For why drives on that ship so fast,
Without or wave or wind?
The air is cut away before,
And closes from behind.
Topic: Ships
Source: The Ancient Mariner
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And they three passed over the white sands, between the rocks,
silent as the shadows.
Topic: Silence
Source: The Wanderings of Cain
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Silence is a friend who will never betray.
Topic: Silence
Source: The Wanderings of Cain
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O sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven
That slid into my soul.
Topic: Sleep
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. V, st. 1)
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Visit her, gentle Sleep! with wings of healing,
And may this storm be but a mountain-birth,
May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling,
Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!
Topic: Sleep
Source: Dejection--An Ode (st. 8)
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The knight's bones are dust,
And his good sword rust;
His soul is with the saints, I trust.
Topic: Soldiers
Source: The Knight's Tomb
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Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea.
Topic: Solitude
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. IV)
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So lonely 'twas that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
Topic: Solitude
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. VII)
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A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.
Topic: Sound
Source: The Ancient Mariner (pt. V, st. 18)
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And the spring comes slowly up this way.
Topic: Spring
Source: Christabel (pt. I)
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Hast thou a charm to stay the morning-star
In his steep course?
Topic: Stars
Source: Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni
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Or soar aloft to be the spangled skies
And gaze upon her with a thousand eyes.
Topic: Stars
Source: Lines on an Autumnal Evening
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I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
Topic: Tolerance
Source: None
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Prose, words in their best order. Poetry, the best words in the best order.
Topic: Vocabulary
Source: None
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Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yes, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.
Topic: Water
Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (pt. II, st. 9)
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The frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind.
Topic: Winter
Source: Frost at Midnight (l. 1)
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All Nature seems at work, slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And Winter, slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Topic: Work
Source: Work Without Hope (st. 1)
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Life went a-Maying
With Nature, Hope, and Poesy;
When I was young!
When I was young?--Ah, woful when!
Topic: Youth
Source: Youth and Age
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