Lord Byron

'Tis pleasing to be school'd in a strange tongue by female lips and eyes - that is I mean, When both the teacher and the taught are young, As was the case at least where I have been, They smile so when one's right, and when one's wrong, They smile still more.

I stood / Among them but not of them, in a shroud / Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

He left a Corsair's name to other times / Linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes.

A mind at peace with all below / A heart whose love is innocent!

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs and rather check than punish crimes had not Cervantes in that all too true tale of Quixote shown how all such efforts fail.

Even I / Regained my freedom with a sigh.

Still must I hear? - shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl / His creaking couplets in a tavern hall / And I not sing?

The dew of compassion is a tear.

I am never long even in the society of her I love without yearning for the company of my lamp and my library

I have met with most poetry on trunks, so that I am pat to consider the trunk-maker as the sexton of authorship.

With just enough of learning to misquote

Dreading that climax of all human ills / The inflammation of his weekly bills.

I die - but first I have possessed / And come what may I have been blessed.

Nay more though all my rival rhymesters frown / I too can hunt a poetaster down.

Ah! happy years! once more who would not be a boy?

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole my entire my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

Nor be what man should ever be / The friend of Beauty in distress?

I know that two and two make four -- and should be glad to prove it too if I could -- though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

Where there is mystery it is generally suspected there must also be evil.

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.