John Keats

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”

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

“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.”

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

“My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.”

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

“Love is my religion - I could die for it.”

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

“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.”

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

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

“Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.”

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

“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.”

“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.”