My favourite excerpts from Ulysses

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d

To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire

Ulysses
Alfred Lord Tennyson