3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
3 December 2020 John Keats Poetry should… should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
3 December 2020 John Keats 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
3 December 2020 John Keats Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases it will never pass into nothingness.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 John Keats I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
