Top 100 John Keats Quotes
#1. His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
John Keats
#2. Besides, a long poem is a test of invention, which I take to be the Polar star of Poetry, as Fancy is the sails - and Imagination the rudder.
John Keats
#3. Already with thee! tender is the night ...
But here there is no light ...
John Keats
#5. Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.
John Keats
#6. Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemiz'd, and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven!
John Keats
#7. A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.
John Keats
#8. But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?
John Keats
#9. Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
John Keats
#10. For many a time I have been half in love with easeful death. Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath
John Keats
#11. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.
John Keats
#12. Why employ intelligent and highly paid ambassadors and then go and do their work for them? You don't buy a canary and sing yourself.
John Keats
#13. I would jump down Etna for any public good - but I hate a mawkish popularity.
John Keats
#14. Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them; thou has thy music too.
John Keats
#15. The opinion I have of the generality of women
who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
John Keats
#16. I came to feel how far above
All fancy, pride, and fickle maidenhood,
All earthly pleasure, all imagined good,
Was the warm tremble of a devout kiss.
John Keats
#17. Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.
John Keats
#18. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs
for their religion
I have shuddered at it,
I shudder no more.
I could be martyred for my religion.
Love is my religion
and I could die for that.
I could die for you.
My Creed is Love and you are its only tenet.
John Keats
#19. But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings
That fill the sky with silver glitterings!
John Keats
#20. Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.
John Keats
#21. Life is but a day:
A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way
From a tree's summit
John Keats
#22. I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats
#23. There is an old saying "well begun is half done" - 'tis a bad one. I would use instead, "Not begun at all till half done;" so according to that I have not begun my Poem and consequently (a priori) can say nothing about it.
John Keats
#24. Sometimes goldfinches one by one will drop From low hung branches; little space they stop; But sip, and twitter, and their feathers sleek; Then off at once, as in a wanton freak: Or perhaps, to show their black, and golden wings Pausing upon their yellow flutterings.
John Keats
#25. Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
On death
John Keats
#26. I cannot capture your grace in words; I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you.
John Keats
#28. You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.
John Keats
#29. It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
John Keats
#30. Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer time away.
John Keats
#31. I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
John Keats
#32. Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,
- Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead.
Awake! arise! my love and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.
John Keats
#33. The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
John Keats
#34. I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter.
John Keats
#35. You are always new. The last of your kisses was even the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.
John Keats
#36. Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown, To bow for gratitude before Jove's throne.
John Keats
#37. I don't need the stars in the night I found my treasure All I need is you by my side so shine forever
John Keats
#38. Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
John Keats
#39. If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats
#40. I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.
John Keats
#41. The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it Nor numbed sense to steel it.
John Keats
#42. You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour ...
John Keats
#43. Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow.
John Keats
#44. O fret not after knowledge - I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge - I have none, and yet the Evening listens.
John Keats
#45. No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.
John Keats
#46. Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmur of tender lullabies!
John Keats
#47. Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - how good how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry.
John Keats
#48. What, man, do you mistake the hollow sky For a thronged tavern ... ?
John Keats
#49. Let me write not for fame and laurel, but from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful even if my night's labors be burnt each morning and no eye ever shine upon them.
John Keats
#50. I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
John Keats
#51. Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not
John Keats
#52. Tis very sweet to look into the fair
and open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
full in the smile of the blue firmament.
John Keats
#53. O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
John Keats
#54. He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.
John Keats
#55. Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again
John Keats
#56. Ay, on the shores of darkness there is a light, and precipices show untrodden green; there is a budding morrow in midnight; there is triple sight in blindness keen.
John Keats
#57. She dwells with Beauty
Beauty that must die: And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding Adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee mouths sips:
John Keats
#58. I never was in love - yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.
John Keats
#59. Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
John Keats
#60. I never can feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its beauty.
John Keats
#61. What occasions the greater part of the world's quarrels? Simply this: Two minds meet and do not understand each other in time enough to prevent any shock of surprise at the conduct of either party.
John Keats
#62. I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.
John Keats
#63. I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.
John Keats
#64. Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds
Along the pebbled shore of memory!
Many old rotten-timber'd boats there be
Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified
To goodly vessels; many a sail of pride,
And golden keel'd, is left unlaunch'd and dry.
John Keats
#65. I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.
John Keats
#66. Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.
John Keats
#67. Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous - who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?
John Keats
#68. Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.
John Keats
#69. We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.
John Keats
#70. Literary men are ... a perpetual priesthood.
John Keats
#71. We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.
John Keats
#72. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth
John Keats
#73. I will clamber through the clouds and exist.
John Keats
#74. A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
John Keats
#75. 31To cease upon the midnight with no pain
John Keats
#76. His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
John Keats
#77. 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
#78. The poetry of the earth is never dead.
John Keats
#79. Truth is beauty; beauty truth and that is all you need to know
John Keats
#80. Her hair was long , her foot was light and her eyes were wild. -Keats
John Keats
#81. Stop and consider! life is but a day
John Keats
#82. If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me - nothing to make my friends proud of my memory - but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.
John Keats
#83. And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
John Keats
#85. There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
John Keats
#86. I love your hills and I love your dales, And I love your flocks a-bleating; but oh, on the heather to lie together, With both our hearts a-beating!
John Keats
#87. Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive.
John Keats
#88. My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk
John Keats
#90. Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced.
John Keats
#91. Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
John Keats
#92. Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.
John Keats
#93. But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I lay them at your feet. Tread lightly, for you tread on my dreams.
John Keats
#94. It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
John Keats
#95. Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
John Keats
#96. Her fearful sobs, self-folding like a flower That faints into itself at evening hour:
John Keats
#97. Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.
John Keats
#98. The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children.
John Keats
#99. Feeling well that breathed words Would all be lost, unheard, and vain as swords Against the enchased crocodile, or leaps Of grasshoppers against the sun ...
John Keats
#100. I have nothing to speak of but my self-and what can I say but what I feel
John Keats
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
