Top 357 Quotes & Sayings by John Keats

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English poet John Keats.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
John Keats

John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, although his poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
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.
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? — © John Keats
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
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.
Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.
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.
You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest. — © John Keats
You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
Love is my religion - I could die for it.
Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.
I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
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.
With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
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.
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.
He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.
I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more - I could be martyred for my religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that.
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. — © John Keats
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.
I don't need the stars in the night I found my treasure All I need is you by my side so shine forever
To silence gossip, don't repeat it.
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.
Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making.
Every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.
Health is the greatest of blessings - with health and hope we should be content to live. — © John Keats
Health is the greatest of blessings - with health and hope we should be content to live.
Shed no tear - O, shed no tear! The flower will bloom another year. Weep no more - O, weep no more! Young buds sleep in the root's white core.
Its better to lose your ego to the One you Love than to lose the One you Love to your Ego
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity.
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.
To stay youthful, stay useful.
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
O let me lead her gently o'er the brook, Watch her half-smiling lips and downward look; O let me for one moment touch her wrist; Let me one moment to her breathing list; And as she leaves me, may she often turn Her fair eyes looking through her locks auburne.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget.
I have so much of you in my heart.
If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all.
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