Top 100 Quotes About Keats
#1. His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
John Keats
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.
John Keats
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Already with thee! tender is the night ...
But here there is no light ...
John Keats
#13. 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
#14. You are to me an object so intensely desirable that the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy
John Keats
#15. 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
#16. Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?
John Keats
#19. It's ridiculous to accept on a blog or in a forum speech what would be seen as hooliganism or delinquency if practiced in a public space."37
Danielle Keats Citron
#20. A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.
John Keats
#21. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#22. 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
#23. Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.
John Keats
#24. We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
John Keats
#25. There was a day when writers actually read," he grumbles. "They could quote Keats and Socrates. Now anyone with a keyboard and a fifth-grade education can call themselves a writer.
J. Lincoln Fenn
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.
John Keats
#29. 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
#30. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.
David Mitchell
#31. The same that oft-times hath
charm'd magic casements,
opening on the foam
of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
John Keats
#32. Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!
Wilfred Owen
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#36. I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.
John Keats
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Keats was getting a reputation just when he was too ill to appreciate it or build on it: his country was taking notice of him just when he would have to leave it.
Jude Morgan
#40. The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn.
John Keats
#41. That queen of secrecy, the violet.
John Keats
#42. 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
#43. But what, without the social thought of thee,
Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?
John Keats
#44. 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
#45. Love is my religion--I could die for it.
John Keats
#46. 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
#47. I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.
Aravind Adiga
#48. I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
John Keats
#49. Whereas Hunt recommended universal charity, Keats, feeling himself 'in a Mist', relied on a knowing passivity: 'Men should bear with each other - there lives not the Man who may not be cut up, aye hashed to pieces on his weakest side'.
Nicholas Roe
#50. 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
#51. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.
John Keats
#52. 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
#53. Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.
John Keats
#54. 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
#55. I would jump down Etna for any public good - but I hate a mawkish popularity.
John Keats
#56. He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.
John Keats
#57. When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true.
Andrew Motion
#58. 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
#59. Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them; thou has thy music too.
John Keats
#60. Open afresh your rounds of starry folds, Ye ardent Marigolds.
John Keats
#61. Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.
John Keats
#62. Was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music
do I wake or sleep?
John Keats
#63. 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
#64. Coexisting with the radiant masculinity of Apollonian Keats is a lunar poet of enchanted night in thrall to the goddess Hecate.
Nicholas Roe
#65. evidently there was such a thing as "the childhood best friends law," by which any relationship involving two such individuals was immediately forgiven regardless of circumstance and then romanticized beyond any reasonable human being's suspension of disbelief.
Alice Keats
#66. 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
#67. Even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live.
John Keats
#68. Dry your eyes O dry your eyes, For I was taught in Paradise To ease my breast of melodies.
John Keats
#69. I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what?
John Keats
#70. The verses of Byron, Keats or Poe are real whether they are in bootleg form or not. You can still read them for the same effect.
Jasper Fforde
#71. 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
#72. Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.
John Keats
#73. John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.
J.D. Salinger
#74. When it is moving on luxurious wings,
The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings.
John Keats
#75. 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
#76. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
John Keats
#77. I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
John Keats
#78. Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.
Ben Whishaw
#79. O, sorrow! Why dost borrow Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?
John Keats
#80. I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?
Jane Campion
#81. But let me see thee stoop from heaven on wings
That fill the sky with silver glitterings!
John Keats
#82. 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
#83. Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth.
John Keats
#85. I have clung To nothing, lov'd a nothing, nothing seen Or felt but a great dream!
John Keats
#86. Yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From out dark spirits.
John Keats
#87. The two divinest things the world has got - A lovely woman and a rural spot.
John Keats
#88. Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.
John Keats
#89. Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
John Keats
#90. Life is but a day:
A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way
From a tree's summit
John Keats
#91. 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
#92. Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
John Keats
#93. I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
On death
John Keats
#98. One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see.
Ezra Jack Keats
#99. I cannot capture your grace in words; I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you.
John Keats
#100. Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is - Love, forgive us! - cinders, ashes, dust.
John Keats
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