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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.