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. – John Keats
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. – John Keats
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. – John Keats
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate. – John Keats
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? – John Keats
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. – John Keats
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel. – John Keats
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. – John Keats
Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. – John Keats
Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever. – 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. – John Keats
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. – John Keats
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. – John Keats
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. – John Keats
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. – John Keats
I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. – John Keats