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
You are always new, The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.
With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
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.
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
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.
The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
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 excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
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.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
