“A man should know something of everything and everything of something.”

Advocating both broad cultural awareness and deep expertise · Essay / remarks on education (commonly attributed)

• Art
• Truth

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”

Portraying books as vessels that transmit the vitality of their authors’ minds · Areopagitica (essay), 1644

• Art
• Memory
• Time

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

Affirming free thought, speech, and conscience as fundamental liberties · Areopagitica (essay), 1644

• Art
• Truth

“He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.”

Defending books as essential expressions of human reason · Areopagitica (essay), 1644

• Art
• Truth

“A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

Celebrating books as vessels that preserve the living force of the mind · Areopagitica (essay), 1644

• Art
• Memory
• Time

“The finest wits are not the soundest judgments.”

Distinguishing verbal brilliance from practical wisdom · Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (prose fiction)

• Art
• Truth

“A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body.”

Describing the poet’s radical capacity for imaginative identification · Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 27 October 1818

• Art
• Poetry

“I mean Negative Capability, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

Valuing imaginative openness over the demand for immediate certainty · Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“I have no idea whether it is any good or not.”

A strikingly self-effacing comment about a poem that later became famous · Letter to his parents

• Art
• Fame

“It was written in about twenty minutes.”

Suggesting the suddenness and immediacy of creative inspiration · Letter to his parents

• Art
• Time

“It is called High Flight and was inspired by a flight I made a few days ago.”

Connecting poetic inspiration directly with the experience of flying · Letter to his parents

• Art
• Nature

“The corruption of a poet is the generation of a critic.”

A wry observation on how creative practice can turn into judgement of others · Essay of Dramatic Poesy

• Art
• Poetry

“Poetry is a speaking picture, with this end, to teach and delight.”

Defining poetry as an art that combines representation, instruction, and pleasure · Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern

• Art
• Poetry

“A play ought to be a just image of human nature; but it is not necessary that it should be a true history of the times.”

Distinguishing truthful human representation from literal historical record · Essay of Dramatic Poesy

• Art
• Truth

“The end of poetry is to instruct, and the end of instruction is to please.”

Joining moral instruction to the pleasure that makes poetry memorable · Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern

• Art
• Poetry

“The mind of man is the great object of dramatic imitation.”

Presenting human nature and its passions as the central subject of drama · Preface to A Series of Plays

• Art
• Poetry
• Truth

“I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on till I am.”

Capturing the persistence required to recover creative momentum · Letter to Cassandra Austen

• Art
• Poetry

“The Negro's greatest contribution to American civilization has been in the field of music.”

Recognising music as a central contribution of Black American culture · Essay / cultural criticism

• Art
• Music

“The imagination is the one thing besides honesty that a human being should have.”

Linking creative vision with moral integrity · Prose remark, commonly attributed to James Stephens

• Art
• Truth

“Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.”

A distinction between controllable talent and the compelling force of genius. · My Study Windows (1871), essay “Dante”

• Art
• Poetry

“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”

Celebrating books as agents of intellectual connection · Essay on books and libraries

• Art
• Friendship

“A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”

Recasting error as a deliberate route towards artistic and intellectual discovery · Prose fiction

• Art
• Truth

“I have written Ulysses to keep the critics busy for three hundred years.”

Expressing his ambition to create work that would sustain prolonged interpretation · Conversation, as reported by contemporaries

• Art
• Fame

“The pleasures of imagination are the most refined and exquisite of all.”

Celebrating imaginative experience as a particularly elevated form of pleasure · Essay on Poetry and Music

• Art
• Beauty
• Joy