“Change is certain. Peace is followed by disturbances; departure of evil men by their return. Such recurrences should not constitute occasions for sadness but realities for awareness, so that one may be happy in the interim”

“We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand'ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,The path of its departure still is free.Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;Nought may endure but Mutability!”

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

“What then is this harmony, this order that you maintain to have required for its establishment, what it needs not for its maintenance, the agency of a supernatural intelligence? Inasmuch as the order visible in the Universe requires one cause, so does the disorder whose operation is not less clearly apparent demand another. Order and disorder are no more than modifications of our own perceptions of the relations which subsist between ourselves and external objects, and if we are justified in inferring the operation of a benevolent power from the advantages attendant on the former, the evils of the latter bear equal testimony to the activity of a malignant principle, no less pertinacious in inducing evil out of good, than the other is unremitting in procuring good from evil.”

“Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - He hath awakened from the dream of life”

“Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combinedWhich scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness where it left delight,I dare not guess; but in this lifeOf error, ignorance, and strife,Where nothing is, but all things seem,And we the shadows of the dream,It is a modest creed, and yetPleasant if one considers it,To own that death itself must be,Like all the rest, a mockery.That garden sweet, that lady fair,And all sweet shapes and odors there,In truth have never passed away:'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they.For love, and beauty, and delight, There is no death or change: their mightExceeds our organs, which endureNo light, being themselves obscure.(--Conclusion, Autumn - A Dirge)”

“Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - "On Life”