If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.

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.

Fame like a wayward girl, will still be coy – To those who woo her with too slavish knees

Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer.

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

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination.

My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have...

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

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?

Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers

O how frail / To that large utterance of the early Gods!

They shall be accounted poet kings / Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.

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.

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

Call the world, if you please, “the Vale of Soul Making”. Then you will find out the use of the world….There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions — but they are...

And there I shut her wild, wild eyes / With kisses four.

So the two brothers and their murdered man / Rode past fair Florence.

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

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...

O cruelty, / To steal my Basil-pot away from me!

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit...

Tis the witching hour of night,Orbed is the moon and bright,And the stars they glisten, glisten,Seeming with bright eyes to listenFor what they listen?

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.

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

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skiews, And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed? What little town by river...

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.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvid earth…

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

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

Love in a hut, with water and a crust, / Is – Love forgive us! – cinders, ashes, dust.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Should ever the fine-eyed maid to me be kind; Ah! surely it must be whenever I find; Some flowery spot, sequestered, wild, romantic; That often must have seen a poet frantic.

For ever piping songs for ever new.

I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning – and yet it must be.

Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth’s...

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,...

Leaving great verse unto a little clan.

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

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,/ And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; / Round many western islands have I been / Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

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?

I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.

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

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect

Health is my expected heaven.