John Keats Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

John Keats
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced — Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.

John Keats
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!"

John Keats
Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave
Round every spot where trod Apollo's foot;
Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
Where long ago a giant battle was;
And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
In every place where infant Orpheus slept.
Feel we these things? — that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's. But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading, by degrees,
To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.

John Keats
I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.

John Keats
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender'd,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr'd From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon.

John Keats
'Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian.

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

John Keats
Who, of men, can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,
If human souls did never kiss and greet?

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

John Keats
The poet and the dreamer are distinct,
Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes.
The one pours out a balm upon the world,
The other vexes it.

John Keats
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.

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

John Keats
Nor do we merely feel these essences
For one short hour; no, even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self, so does the moon,
The passion poesy, glories infinite,
Haunt us till they become a cheering light
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o'ercast,
They alway must be with us, or we die.

John Keats
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
Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown, To bow for gratitude before Jove's throne.

John Keats
The open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown - the Air is our robe of state - the Earth is our throne, and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it.

John Keats
Oh, what can ail thee knight at arms
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake
And no birds sing!

John Keats
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud.

John Keats
Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? —"On death

John Keats
Scenery is fine — but human nature is finer.

John Keats
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

John Keats
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.

John Keats
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape?
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

John Keats
Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.

John Keats
They will explain themselves — as all poems should do without any comment.

John Keats
For, by all the stars That tend thy bidding, I do think the bars That kept my spirit in are burst - that I Am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! How beautiful thou art!

John Keats
I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill's side.

John Keats
You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour...

John Keats
Should Disappointment, parent of Despair, Strive for her son to seize my careless heart; When, like a cloud, he sits upon the air, Preparing on his spell-bound prey to dart: Chase him away, sweet Hope, with visage bright, And fright him as the morning frightens night!

John Keats