Top 100 Quotes About John Keats
#1. John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
J.D. Salinger
#2. What had John Keats said about Negative Capability - holding two opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them?
Dan Simmons
#3. What I deeply want ... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self.
Coleman Barks
#4. I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff.
Bob Dylan
#5. I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats.
Margaret Atwood
#7. It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.
Jane Campion
#8. To John Keats Whose Name Was Writ in Eternity
Dan Simmons
#9. I believe in nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. - JOHN KEATS
Jandy Nelson
#10. I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.
John Keats
#11. If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
Shelby Foote
#12. Touch'd with miseries
She seem'd at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
- Lamia (John Keats)
John Keats
#13. His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
John Keats
#14. 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.
John Keats
#15. A thing of beauty is a joy forever: It's loveliness increases: it will never pass into nothingness. Pleasure is oft a visitant, but pain clings cruelty to us.
John Keats
#16. 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
#17. Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?
John Keats
#18. Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.
John Keats
#19. Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?
John Keats
#20. Bold Lover, never, never canst Thou kiss, Though winning near the goalyet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though Thou hast not Thy bliss, Forever wilt Thou love, and she be fair
John Keats
#21. An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.
John Keats
#22. So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
John Keats
#23. Already with thee! tender is the night ...
But here there is no light ...
John Keats
#24. Severn - I - lift me up - I am dying - I shall die easy; don't be frightened - be firm, and thank God it has come.
John Keats
#25. You are to me an object so intensely desirable that the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy
John Keats
#26. A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence because he has no identity-he is continually infirming and filling some other body.
John Keats
#27. Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?
John Keats
#30. A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
John Keats
#31. When shall we pass a day alone? I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love - but if you should deny me the thousand and first - 'twould put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.
John Keats
#32. Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.
John Keats
#33. We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
John Keats
#34. Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears,
and hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,
Tonight if I may guess, thy beauty wears a smile of such delight,
As brilliant and as bright
As when with ravished, aching, nassal eyes,
Lost in a soft amaze
I gaze, I gaze
John Keats
#35. 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
#36. A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.
John Keats
#37. To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.
John Keats
#38. The same that oft-times hath
charm'd magic casements,
opening on the foam
of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
John Keats
#39. My spirit is too weak
mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
John Keats
#40. It is a flaw In happiness to see beyond our bourn, - It forces us in summer skies to mourn, It spoils the singing of the nightingale.
John Keats
#41. I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.
John Keats
#42. Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
John Keats
#43. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
John Keats
#44. The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn.
John Keats
#45. That queen of secrecy, the violet.
John Keats
#46. 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.
John Keats
#47. But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?
John Keats
#48. There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in the rubbish.
John Keats
#49. Love is my religion--I could die for it.
John Keats
#50. 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
#51. I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
John Keats
#52. 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
#53. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.
John Keats
#54. How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.
John Keats
#55. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
John Keats
#56. 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
#57. I would jump down Etna for any public good - but I hate a mawkish popularity.
John Keats
#58. He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.
John Keats
#59. Faded the flower and all its budded charms,Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise!Vanishd unseasonably
John Keats
#60. Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them; thou has thy music too.
John Keats
#61. Open afresh your rounds of starry folds, Ye ardent Marigolds.
John Keats
#62. Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.
John Keats
#63. Was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music
do I wake or sleep?
John Keats
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live.
John Keats
#67. Dry your eyes O dry your eyes, For I was taught in Paradise To ease my breast of melodies.
John Keats
#68. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what?
John Keats
#69. 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.
John Keats
#70. Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.
John Keats
#71. When it is moving on luxurious wings,
The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings.
John Keats
#72. 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
#73. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#74. I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
John Keats
#75. O, sorrow! Why dost borrow Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?
John Keats
#76. But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings
That fill the sky with silver glitterings!
John Keats
#77. No, no, I'm sure, My restless spirit never could endure To brood so long upon one luxury, Unless it did, though fearfully, espy A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.
John Keats
#78. Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth.
John Keats
#80. I have clung To nothing, lov'd a nothing, nothing seen Or felt but a great dream!
John Keats
#81. Yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From out dark spirits.
John Keats
#82. The two divinest things the world has got - A lovely woman and a rural spot.
John Keats
#83. Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.
John Keats
#84. Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
John Keats
#85. Life is but a day:
A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way
From a tree's summit
John Keats
#86. No one can usurp the heights ...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.
John Keats
#87. Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
John Keats
#88. I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats
#89. Young playmates of the rose and daffodil, Be careful ere ye enter in, to fill Your baskets high With fennel green, and balm, and golden pines Savory latter-mint, and columbines.
John Keats
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
On death
John Keats
#93. I cannot capture your grace in words; I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you.
John Keats
#94. Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is - Love, forgive us! - cinders, ashes, dust.
John Keats
#95. O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
John Keats
#96. The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#98. You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.
John Keats
#99. To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.
John Keats
#100. I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become more acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.
John Keats
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