Flowers really do intoxicate me.
Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application. Beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of poems which the nation now swarms withal; and let not the Circaen cup intoxicate you. But especially preserve the chastity of your soul from the dangers you may incur, by a conversation with muses no better than harlots.
We waste our best years in distilling the sweetest flowers of life into potions which, after all, do not immortalize, but only intoxicate.
It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.
The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.
Words may be either the servants or masters. If the former they may safely guide us in the way of truth. If the latter they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of thought where there is no solid footing. Among the sources of those innumerable calamities which from age to age have overwhelmed mankind, may be reckoned as one of the principal, the abuse of words.
Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but they enchant.
