John Keats

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect; the savage too From forth the loamy earth of dreams doth raise His tribe's ideal, buildings that shall last To the utmost verge of a horizon—so Think I right and wrong, and all things, that are made, For Man's instruction, are a dream.

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, not a select party.

I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.

I feel the want of a kind of thermal atmosphere about me.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

I have great hopes of success, and I am not without a certain degree of confidence.

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.

The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth.

I am in too great a tremor of joy to write a word.

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.

I look upon fine phrases as a lover.

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.

I have not a right to an atom of pleasure, I have no right to enjoy myself.

The more we know, the more we are capable of knowing.

I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I shall be more at home in the fabulous than in the didactic and the historical.

I have been a coward, but I will be so no more.

My heart has been wounded, and I have been made to suffer.

I am in a state of mortal sickness, and I am dying.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.

I can feel the cold hand of death upon me.