The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
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Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
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A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing...
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Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
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O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge -- I have none, and yet the Evening listens.
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I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
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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.
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When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.
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Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
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I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
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There's a blush for won t, and a blush for shan't, and a blush for having done it: There's a blush for thought and a blush for naught, and a blush for just begun it.
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The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
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Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
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Failure is in a sense the highway to success, as each discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true.
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There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
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I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
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Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous -- who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?
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The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.
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I always made an awkward bow.
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Health is my expected heaven.
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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.
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It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
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My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
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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.
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I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
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My passions are all asleep from my having slumbered till nearly eleven and weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sensation about three degrees on this sight of faintness -- if I had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies I should call it languor -- but as I am I must call it laziness. In this state of effeminacy the fibers of the brain are relaxed in common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy degree that pleasure has no show of enticement and pain no unbearable frown. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
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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.
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Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
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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. Not a select party.
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Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
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Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.
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Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water-lilied pond to eat white currants and see goldfish: and go to the fair in the evening if I'm good. There is not hope for that --one is sure to get into some mess before evening.
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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.
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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.
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I would jump down Etna for any public good -- but I hate a mawkish popularity.
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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.
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A proverb is not a proverb to you until life has illustrated it.
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The Public is a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
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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.
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Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!
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There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
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Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel --or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime.
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O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
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Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
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What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.
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