I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.

What is more gentle than a wind is summer?

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away.

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.

it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.