“Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.”

“Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.”

“My soul to-day
Is far away
Sailing the Vesuvian Bay.”

“In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind, old men as guides.”

“Thou Great First Cause, least understood
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that Thou art good
And that myself am blind.”

“I saw him open his mouth wide… as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”

“He died,
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
Blind, old, and lonely.”

“To men a man is but a mind. Who cares
What face he carries or what form he wears?
But woman's body is the woman. O,
Stay thou, my sweetheart, and do never go,
But heed the warning words the sage hath said:
A woman absent is a woman dead.”

“[T]he young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.”

“I saw my father as a man, and not, as a man who was my father.”