I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer.

The Public – a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.

He ne’er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.

You are always new, The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Now a soft kiss – Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.

Love is my religion – I could die for it.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify – so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion – I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more – I could be martyred for my religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.