“Guess now, who holds thee?”
“Death,” I said. But there
The silver answer rang – “Not Death, but Love.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)

“Teach me half the gladness
That the brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

“To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know,
You must go by the way which is the way of ignorance.”
T.S. Eliot

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Henry David Thoreau

“I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.”
Albert Camus, La Chute (1956)