John Keats Quotations

I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.

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

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

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

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

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.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

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.

It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

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.

Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.

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.

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.

He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

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.

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 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.

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

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

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.

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.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.

O cruelty, / To steal my Basil-pot away from me!

Point me out the way / To any one particular beauteous star.

Shakespeare led a life of allegory; his works are the comments on it.

Four seasons fill the measure of the year; / There are four seasons in the mind of man.

Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters; / Enough their simple loveliness for me.

God of the golden bow, / And of the golden lyre, / And of the golden hair, / And of the golden fire, / Charioteer / Of the patient year, / Where - where slept thine ire?

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.

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

Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu

To set budding more, / And still more, later flowers for the bees, / Until they think warm days will never cease, / For summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Stop and consider! life is but a day; A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way From a tree's summit; a poor Indian's sleep While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep Of Montmorenci

Real are the dreams of Gods, and smoothly pass / Their pleasures in a long immortal dream.

O soft embalmer of the still midnight, / Shutting, with careful fingers and benign / Our gloom-pleased eyes.

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

They shall be accounted poet kings / Who simply tell the most heart-easing things.

A drainless shower / Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme power; / 'Tis might half slumbering on his own right arm.

And sure in language strange she said, / I love thee true.

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

Ever let thy Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home

Health is the greatest of blessings - with health and hope we should be content to live.

Dry your eyes O dry your eyes, For I was taught in Paradise To ease my breast of melodies.

The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth.

Stop and consider! life is but a day

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.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?

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.

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.

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

I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hands' weaving.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold.

Where soil is, men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers.

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.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan Upon the midnight hours.

I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women -- at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.

Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience.

The silver, snarling trumpets 'gan to chide.

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.

I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried- "La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!

A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no identity he is continually informing and filling some other body.

I stood tip-toe upon a little hill, The air was cooling, and so very still, That the sweet buds which with a modest pride Pull droopingly, in slanting curve aside, Their scantly leaved, and finely tapering stems, Had not yet lost those starry diadems Caught from the early sobbing of the morn.

I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.

There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.

Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.

Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making.

His religion at best is an anxious wish,-like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.

Works of genius are the first things in the world.

A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true.

To stay youthful, stay useful.

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

Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.

You are always new to me.

The genius of poetry must work out its own salvation in a man; it cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is creative must create itself.

Or thou might'st better listen to the wind, Whose language is to thee a barren noise, Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.

To bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty

O for the gentleness of old Romance, the simple planning of a minstrel's song!

Its better to lose your ego to the One you Love than to lose the One you Love to your Ego

In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity.

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."

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us - and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. - How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!"

Many have original minds who do not think it - they are led away by custom!