“Health is my expected heaven.”
“I always made an awkward bow.”
“My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.”
“I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.”
“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”
“There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.”
“A proverb is not a proverb to you until life has illustrated it.”
“I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.”
“I would jump down Etna for any public good -- but I hate a mawkish popularity.”
“Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!”
“When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.”
“Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.”
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.”
“O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings”
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.”
“Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.”
“It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.”
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
“The Public is a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.”
“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”