Creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and with such co-presence of the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. (Describing his poetic ideal, 1817)

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

Rage is essentially vulgar.

A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

The misery of human life is made up of large masses, each separated from the other by certain intervals. One year the death of a child; years after, a failure in trade; after another longer or shorter interval, a daughter may have married unhappily; in all but the singularly unfortunate, the integral parts that compose the sum-total of the unhappiness of a man's life are easily counted and distinctly remembered.

Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation

It is a flat'ning Thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.