John Keats Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm'd — see here it is —
I hold it towards you.

John Keats
He played an ancient ditty, long since mute,
In Provence called, 'La belle dame sans mercy.'

John Keats
Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.

John Keats
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young.

John Keats
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 Godess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.

John Keats
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 hand's weaving.

John Keats
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
There is nothing stable in the world—uproar's your only music.

John Keats
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honeyed middle of the night.

John Keats
In disease Medical Men guess: if they cannot ascertain a disease, they call it nervous.

John Keats
To make delicious moan Upon the midnight hours.

John Keats
I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. 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
A man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world.

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

John Keats
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
My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.

John Keats
Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; every thing else tastes like chaff in my mouth.

John Keats
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

John Keats
O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings

John Keats
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen.

John Keats
To Hope "When by my solitary hearth I sit, And hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom; When no fair dreams before my 'mind's eye' flit, And the bare heath of life presents no bloom; Sweet Hope, ethereal balm upon me shed, And wave thy silver pinions o'er my head.

John Keats
Old Meg she was a Gipsy,
And liv'd upon the Moors:
Her bed it was the brown heath turf,
And her house was out of doors.
Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants pods o' broom;
Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a churchyard tomb.

John Keats
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.

John Keats