John Keats

“My chest of books divide amongst my friends.”

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

“Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.”

“Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.”

“My spirit is too weak — mortalityWeighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,And each imagin'd pinnacle and steepOf godlike hardship tells me I must dieLike a sick Eagle looking at the sky.”

“In drear-nighted December,Too happy, happy tree,Thy branches ne'er rememberTheir green felicity.”

“But were there ever anyWrith'd not of passed joy?The feel of not to feel it,When there is none to heal it,Nor numbed sense to steel it,Was never said in rhyme.”

“It keeps eternal whisperings aroundDesolate shores, and with its mighty swellGluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spellOf Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.”

“Shed no tear! O shed no tear!The flower will bloom another year.Weep no more! O weep no more!Young buds sleep in the root's white core.”

“This living hand, now warm and capableOf earnest grasping, would, if it were coldAnd in the icy silence of the tomb,So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nightsThat thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of bloodSo in my veins red life might stream again,And thou be conscience-calm'd — see here it is —I hold it towards you.”

“Bright star! would I were stedfast as thou art —Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth's human shores.”

“None can usurp this height...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.”

“The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast.”

“To his sightThe husk of natural objects opens quiteTo the core; and every secret essence thereReveals the elements of good and fair;Making him see, where Learning hath no light.”

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

“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 — whether it existed before or not.”

“The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream — he awoke and found it truth.”

“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”

“I scarcely remember counting upon happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.”

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.”

“At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

“They will explain themselves — as all poems should do without any comment.”

“Works of genius are the first things in this world.”

“Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.”

“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.”

“We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.”

“Many have original minds who do not think it — they are led away by custom — Now it appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own citadel.”

“Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.”

“I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.”

“I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women - at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.”