Explore Quotes by John Keats

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

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.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

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.

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

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.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

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.

Love is my religion - I could die for it.