Quotes by John Keats

• The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
• My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
• Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
• Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.
• Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
• 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.
• Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
• Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
• The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
• The poetry of the earth is never dead.
• It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
• 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.
• 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.
• What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
• 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.
• I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
• With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
• 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.
• Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
• He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.
• Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
• Love is my religion - I could die for it.
• I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
• Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
• 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.
• 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.
• I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
• 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.
• I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
• 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.
• Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
• Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
• 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.
• You are always new, The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.
• Life is like an onion: you peel off one layer at a time, and sometimes you cry. But remember, the core is still what was beautiful all along.
• Life is too short to take seriously; if you can't laugh at yourself, call me and I’ll laugh at you.
• Life is like a cup of tea: it’s all in how you order it!
• Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, but learning to dance in the rain with colorful umbrellas.
• Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, so ensure you're scribbling poetry in the margins!
• Life is what happens when you’re making other plans—so throw the plan book away and invest in a good map!
• Success is just failure that’s wearing a tuxedo.