Top 30 John Keats Quotes

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.

Love is my religion – I could die for it.

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.

Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer.

Philosophy will clip an angel‘s wings.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

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.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

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

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

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

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.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

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

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

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

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.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

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

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

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.

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

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.