John Keats Quotes

287 Sourced Quotes

My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.

John Keats
I never knew before, what such a love as you have made me feel, was; I did not believe in it; my Fancy was afraid of it, lest it should burn me up. But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures.

John Keats
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. Not a select party.

John Keats
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

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

John Keats
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers.

John Keats
I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love—but if you should deny me the thousand and first—'t would put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.

John Keats
For to bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm,
That is the top of sovereignty.

John Keats
Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to School an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!

John Keats
Many have original minds who do not think it — they are led away by custom — Now it appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own citadel.

John Keats
O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.

John Keats
To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.

John Keats
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

John Keats
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art — Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.

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

John Keats
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.

John Keats
O the flummery of a birth place! Cant! Cant! Cant! It is enough to give a spirit the guts-ache.

John Keats
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.

John Keats
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats
As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave.

John Keats
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats
I never was in love - yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.

John Keats
O fret not after knowledge - I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge - I have none, and yet the Evening listens.

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

John Keats
And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed, Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.

John Keats
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche.

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