100+ Quotes by John Keats
John Keats, a Romantic poet of the early 19th century, is celebrated for his evocative imagery, sensuous language, and exploration of the nature of beauty and mortality. His brief life was marked by a profound engagement with the world and an intense dedication to poetry. Works like "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn" showcase his ability to transport readers into dreamlike realms while contemplating the transience of human existence. Keats' philosophy of "negative capability," embracing uncertainty and doubt, is emblematic of his poetic sensibility. Tragically, he succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 25, leaving behind a body of work that continues to inspire and resonate with readers, immortalizing him as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic era.
John Keats Quotes
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. (Meaning)
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination. (Meaning)
I have so much of you in my heart. (Meaning)
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,-that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know. (Meaning)
Stop and consider! life is but a day (Meaning)
A hope beyond the shadow of a dream. (Meaning)
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success. (Meaning)
Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making. (Meaning)
My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you. (Meaning)
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. (Meaning)
A thing of beauty is a joy forever. (Meaning)
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget. (Meaning)
A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory. (Meaning)
The excellence of every Art is its intensity. (Meaning)
That which is creative must create itself. (Meaning)
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! (Meaning)
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity. (Meaning)
I have loved the principle of beauty in all things. (Meaning)
I want a brighter word than bright (Meaning)
Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss. (Meaning)
Love is my religion - I could die for it. (Meaning)
Death is Life's high meed. (Meaning)
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk. (Meaning)
I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death. (Meaning)
The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone! (Meaning)
The creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it. (Meaning)
Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer. (Meaning)
Beauty is truth, truth beauty (Meaning)
There is a budding morrow in midnight. (Meaning)
What is more gentle than a wind is summer? (Meaning)
My chest of books divide amongst my friends. (Meaning)
I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest. (Meaning)
I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else. (Meaning)
I will clamber through the clouds and exist. (Meaning)
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. (Meaning)
The poetry of the earth is never dead. (Meaning)
It keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores (Meaning)
Here lies one whose name was writ in water. (Meaning)
Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself. (Meaning)
My creed is love and you are its only tenet. (Meaning)
On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence. (Meaning)
Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. (Meaning)
Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death. (Meaning)
Alas! when passion is both meek and wild! (Meaning)
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. (Meaning)
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. (Meaning)
Load every rift with ore. (Meaning)
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. (Meaning)
I always made an awkward bow. (Meaning)
Through the dancing poppies stole A breeze, most softly lulling to my soul.
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 form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.
A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.
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.
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.
And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed, Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.
You are always new, the last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
To silence gossip, don't repeat it.
Love is my religion - I could die for it.
If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all.
My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.
I have so much of you in my heart.
I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.
We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
The creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.
Here are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight; With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white, And taper fingers catching at all things, To bind them all about with tiny rings.
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.
I don't need the stars in the night I found my treasure All I need is you by my side so shine forever
Is there another Life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.
Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.
I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.
Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.
...I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become more acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
That which is creative must create itself.
Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
You are always new. The last of your kisses was even the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.
With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.
Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.
Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
I want a brighter word than bright
I love your hills and I love your dales, And I love your flocks a-bleating; but oh, on the heather to lie together, With both our hearts a-beating!
Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
The poetry of earth is never dead When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide I cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it Nor numbed sense to steel it.
The air is all softness.
We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.
I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.
I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.
Its better to lose your ego to the One you Love than to lose the One you Love to your Ego
To stay youthful, stay useful.
I have loved the principle of beauty in all things.
To bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty
The excellence of every Art is its intensity.
A man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world.
Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success.
... 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.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 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.
A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty
I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.
My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.
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.
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they
Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us.
There is a budding morrow in midnight.
That queen of secrecy, the violet.
Some say the world is a vale of tears, I say it is a place of soul-making.
Death is Life's high meed.
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.
There is a budding tomorrow in midnight.
What is there in thee, Moon! That thou should'st move My heart so potently?
A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory.
I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.
Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive.
Health is the greatest of blessings - with health and hope we should be content to live.
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.
Every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.
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.
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.
Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.
I could be martyred for my religion. Love is my religion and I could die for that. I could die for you.
Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not
You are always new to me.
"Time, that aged nurse,
Rocked me to patience."
I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.
I find I cannot exist without Poetry
Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?
But the rose leaves herself upon the brier, For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed.
Health is my expected heaven.
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 myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of I am, however young, writing at random straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?
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.
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.
If something is not beautiful, it is probably not true.
Stop and consider! life is but a day
O let me lead her gently o'er the brook, Watch her half-smiling lips and downward look; O let me for one moment touch her wrist; Let me one moment to her breathing list; And as she leaves me, may she often turn Her fair eyes looking through her locks auburne.
Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience.
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
All writing is a form of prayer.
It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
O aching time! O moments big as years!
Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown, To bow for gratitude before Jove's throne.
Many have original minds who do not think it - they are led away by custom!
You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.
If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.
It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.
The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled.
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Where soil is, men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers.
one of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind's imagining into another
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity.
I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget.
There is an old saying "well begun is half done"-'tis a bad one. I would use instead-Not begun at all 'til half done.
Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.
I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world.
What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks Our ready minds to fellowship divine, A fellowship with essence; till we shine, Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold The clear religion of heaven!
The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.
I will clamber through the clouds and exist.
There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.
You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour.
I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth.
I have nothing to speak of but my self-and what can I say but what I feel.
Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.
I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.
What is more gentle than a wind is summer?
― John Keats Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
