“Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

“I'm...like a poet hiddenIn the light of thought Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”

“The being called God...bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.”

“Poet's food is love and fame.”

“The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.”

“At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the weak and wicked king of an obscure and barbarous nation, a murderer, a traitor and a tyrant, was the man after God’s own heart?”

“Chameleons feed on light and air: Poets food is love and fame.”