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.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
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 am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
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.
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.
Real are the dreams of gods, and soothly pass their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
The excellence of every Art is its intensity.
Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!
You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.
To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.
When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
My chest of books divide amongst my friends –.
Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
I never was in love – yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.
I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
The uttered part of a man’s life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.
I would jump down Etna for any public good – but I hate a mawkish popularity.
I equally dislike the favor of the public with the love of a woman – they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.