I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination – What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it existed before or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty . . .

The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

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.