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

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

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

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.

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

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

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

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

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.

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

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.

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.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.