“Oh pleasure, you're indeed a pleasant thing, / Although one must be damned for you no doubt. / I make a resolution every spring / Of reformation, ere the year run out.”

“Oh could I feel as I have felt,-or be what I have been,Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanish'd scene;As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,So midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would flow to me.”

“Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist then Pleasure.”

“There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything.”

“‎Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence. Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality; and dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy. They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts, they take a weight off our waking toils. They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, and look like heralds of eternity. They pass like spirits of the past—they speak like sibyls of the future; they have power— the tyranny of pleasure and of pain. They make us what we were not—what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by, the dread of vanished shadows—Are they so? Is not the past all shadow?—What are they? Creations of the mind?—The mind can make substances, and people planets of their own, with beings brighter than have been, and give a breath to forms which can outlive all flesh. I would recall a vision which I dreamed, perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.”

“I doubt sometimes whether a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me - yet I sometimes long for it.”

“Hate is by far the greatest pleasure; men love in haste, but detest in leisure. ”