John Keats

O let me lead her gently o'er the brook, Watch her half-smiling lips and downward look; O let me for one moment touch her wrist; Let me one moment to her breathing list; And as she leaves me, may she often turn Her fair eyes looking through her locks auburne.

Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.

My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity.

I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.

I will clamber through the clouds and exist.

Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them; thou has thy music too.

No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.