29 quotes
The king ...
like the vulgar, thinks, feels, acts, and lives
Just as his father did; the unconquered powers
Of precedent and custom interpose
Between a king and virtue.
Queen Mab (1813)
Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.
Queen Mab (1813)
Gold is a living god and rules in scorn,
All earthly things but virtue.
Queen Mab (1813)
Man is of soul and body, formed for deeds
Of high resolve; on fancy's boldest wing.
Queen Mab (1813)
The word of God has fenced about all crimes with Holiness.
Queen Mab (1813)
Heaven's ebon vault,
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
Queen Mab (1813)
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Queen Mab (1813)
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.
Queen Mab (1813)
Far clouds of feathery gold,
Shaded with deepest purple, gleam
Like islands on a dark blue sea.
Queen Mab (1813)
How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue!
Queen Mab (1813)
Many faint with toil,
That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.
Queen Mab (1813)
How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!
Queen Mab (1813)
Spirit of nature! all-sufficing power,
Necessity! thou mother of the world!
Queen Mab (1813)
And on their lids * * *
The baby Sleep is pillowed.
Queen Mab (1813)
Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry.
Queen Mab (1813)
And man ... no longer now
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh.
Queen Mab (1813)
Thus suicidal selfishness, that blights
The fairest feelings of the opening heart,
Is destined to decay, whilst from the soil
Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love,
And judgment cease to wage unnatural war
With passion's unsubduable array.
Queen Mab (1813)
Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.
Queen Mab (1813)
It is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust.
Queen Mab (1813)
. . . How stern
And desolate a tract is this wide world!
How withered all the buds of natural good!
No shade, no shelter from the sweeping storms
Of pitiless power!
Queen Mab (1813)