John Keats's Quotes

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

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.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

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.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more - I could be martyred for my religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that.

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.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.