Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
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

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

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
John Keats

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

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats

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

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

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
John Keats

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

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
John Keats

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
John Keats

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