Negative capability
more likely to diminish the experience than to enrich it. In a letter to his brothers Keats speaks of 'Negative Capability' as the capacity for ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason'. This seems exactly the response demanded by many of these gardens.
Ian Littlewood • KYOTO WITHOUT CROWDS: A Guide to the City's Most Peaceful Temples and Gardens
The poet John Keats had a term for this crucial capacity to stay patiently in nonconclusion until you discern that it is time to conclude: negative capability, which he defined as “being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Adam Kahane • Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together
In 1817, the poet John Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching ... See more
To live with the tension of opposing truths ‘without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. I’ve always thought that the most powerful word in Keats’s famous celebration of uncertainty in his theory of Negative Capability is irritable, with its root in the Latin for anger, the engine that propels most of our intrusions into the lives of oth
... See moreRichard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
What the poet John Keats called “negative capability”—the holding of multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time—is an essential phase of creativity: the part where your mind is a whirl of ideas. You have to be able to tolerate this and then refine your idea like mad until it gets better.
Ryan Holiday • Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts
On a celebrated midwinter’s night in 1817 the poet John Keats walked home talking with some friends “and several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature …. I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,
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