John Keats Quotes (222 Quotes)

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.

All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead and a parching tongue.

To the very last, he Napoleon had a kind of idea that, namely, of la carrire ouverte aux talents, the tools to him that can handle them.

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

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

I wanted wings:
O folly!

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

How many bards gild the lapses of time!

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.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason....

But what is this to love?

He play'd an ancient ditty long since mute, In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans mercy.'

Then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink

The automobile changed our dress, manners, social customs, vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer purchasing patterns, common tastes and positions in intercourse

Literary men are ... a perpetual priesthood.

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

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

I always made an awkward bow.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

O Sorrow, Why dost borrow Heart's lightness from the merriment of May

I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

O, for a draught of vintage that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvid earth...

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth Have ye souls in heaven too

I have felt
So faint a kindness, such a meek surrender
To what my own full thoughts had made too tender,
That but for tears my life had fled away!

O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.

The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

Where are the songs of Spring Ay, where are they Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

I never can feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its beauty.

Blessed is the healthy nature it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one.

As the Swiss inscription says Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden, 'Speech is silvern, Silence is golden' or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

Failure is in a sense the highway to success, as each discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true.

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

As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.

O latest born and loveliest vision far Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy.

I see a lilly on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too. I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery's child Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that 'ridicule is the test of truth.'

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.

I love your meads, and I love your flowers,
And I love your junkets mainly,
But 'hind the door, I love kissing more,
O look not so disdainly!

The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide.

Aye, he beheld
Phoebe, his passion!

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne, Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!