John Keats

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

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?

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

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.

He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

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

Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

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.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

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

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

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.

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

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

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.