John Keats Quotes

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave a paradise for a sect.

I want a brighter word than bright

Dance and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth! On for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene! With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth.

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.

That queen of secrecy, the violet.

I sit, and moan,
Like one who once had wings.

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

Robin Hood. To a Friend.

No! those days are gone away,
And their hours are old and gray,
And their minutes buried all
Under the down-trodden pall
Ofthe leaves of many years:
Many times have winter's shears,
Frozen North, and chilling East,
Sounded tempests to the feast
Of the forest's whispering fleeces,
Since men knew nor rent nor leases.

No, the bugle sounds no more,
And the twanging bow no more;
Silent is the ivory shrill
Past the heath and up the hill;
There is no mid-forest laugh,
Where lone Echo gives the half
To some wight, amaz'd to hear
Jesting, deep in forest drear.

On the fairest time of June
You may go, with sun or moon,
Or the seven stars to light you,
Or the polar ray to right you;
But you never may behold
Little John, or Robin bold;
Never one, of all the clan,
Thrumming on an empty can
Some old hunting ditty, while
He doth his green way beguile
To fair hostess Merriment,
Down beside the pasture Trent;
For he left the merry tale,
Messenger for spicy ale.

Gone, the merry morris din;
Gone, the song of Gamelyn;
Gone, the tough-belted outlaw
Idling in the "grene shawe";
All are gone away and past!
And if Robin should be cast
Sudden from his turfed grave,
And if Marian should have
Once again her forest days,
She would weep, and he wou

A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.

No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.

On a lone winter evening, when the frost Has wrought a silence.

The creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.

In passing however I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately and encreased my Humility and capability of submission and that is this truth - Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect - but they have not any individuality, any determined Character - I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power.

How I like claret! ... It fills one's mouth with a gushing freshness, then goes down to cool and feverless; then, you do not feel it quarrelling with one's liver. No; 'tis rather a peace-maker, and lies as quiet as it did in the grape. Then it is as fragrant as the Queen Bee, and the more ethereal part mounts into the brain, not assaulting the cerebral apartments, like a bully looking for his trull, and hurrying from door to door, bouncing against the wainscott, but rather walks like Aladdin about his enchanted palace, so gently that you do not feel his step.

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

All my clear-eyed fish, Golden, or rainbow-sided, or purplish, Vermilion-tail'd, or finn'd with silvery gauze ... My charming rod, my potent river spells ...

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.

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

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.

Bright Star
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,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever 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 to death.

Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.

Wine is only sweet to happy men.

There's a blush for won't, and a blush for shan't, and a blush for having done it: There's a blush for thought and a blush for naught, and a blush for just begun it.

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

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity ...

How glorious to be introduced in a drawing room to a Lady who reads Novels, with "Mr. So-and-so - Miss So-and-so; Miss So-and-so, this is Mr So-and-so, who fell off a precipice and was half-drowned." Now I refer to you, whether I should lose so fine an opportunity of making my fortune. No romance lady could resist me - none.

Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once 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 - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

I always made an awkward bow.

For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.

How sad is it when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things which are not.

Are there not thousands in the world who love their fellows even to the death, who feel the giant agony of the world, and more, like slaves to poor humanity, labor for mortal good?

The grandeur of the dooms We have imagined for the mighty dead.

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.

Softly the breezes from the forest came,
Softly they blew aside the taper's flame;
Clear was the song from Philomel's far bower;
Grateful the incense from the lime-tree flower;
Mysterious, wild, the far-heard trumpet's tone;
Lovely the moon in ether, all alone:
Sweet too, the converse of these happy mortals,
As that of busy spirits when the portals
Are closing in the west; or that soft humming
We hear around when Hesperus is coming.
Sweet be their sleep.

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

I see, and sing by my own eyes inspired.
O let me be thy Choir and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged Censer teeming;
Thy Shrine, thy Grove, thy Oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthe'd Prophet dreaming!
Yes, I will be thy Priest and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my Mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pies shall murmer in the wind

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

He who saddens at thought of idleness cannot be idle, / And he's awake who thinks himself asleep.

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.

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell
No God, no demon of severe response
Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell
Then to my human heart I turn at once:
Heart, thou and I are here, sad and alone,
Say, why did I laugh? O mortal pain!
O darkness! darkness! Forever must I moan
To question heaven and hell and heart in vain?
Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease
My fancy to it's utmost blisses spreads
Yet would I on this very midnight cease
And all the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds
Verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed
But death intenser, death is life's high meed.

No, no, I'm sure, 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.

Touch'd with miseries
She seem'd at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
- Lamia (John Keats)

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget...

You are always new to me.

And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/ And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;/ She had no knowledge when the day was done,/ And the new morn she saw not: but in peace/ Hung over her sweet basil evermore,/ And moisten'd it with tears unto the core.

The poetry of the earth is never dead.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

A man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world.

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

He, who is gone, was one of the very kindest friends I possessed, and yet he was not kinder perhaps to me, than to others. His intense mind and powerful feelings would, I truly believe, have done the world some service, had his life been spared but he was of too sensitive a nature and thus he was destroyed!

Every mental pursuit takes its reality and worth from the ardour of the pursuer.

No one can usurp the heights ...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.

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

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!"

Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it - make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me - write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair.

A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmur of tender lullabies!

Tis very sweet to look into the fair
and open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer
full in the smile of the blue firmament.

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-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair.

I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.

To be happy with you seems such an impossibility! it requires a luckier Star than mine! it will never be.

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

Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not

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.

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.

Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? Think not of them; thou has thy music too.

After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding - fruit ripening in stillness - Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves -
Sweet Sappho's cheek - a smiling infant's breath -
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs -
A woodland rivulet - a Poet's death.

I must choose between despair and Energy--I choose the latter.

Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine - how good how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams,
With the fine spell of words alone can save
Imagination from the sable charm
And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.
Whether the dream now purpos'd to rehearse
Be poet's or fanatic's will be known
When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.

So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.

Ruffles all the surface of the lake In striving from its crystal face to take Some diamond water drops, and them to treasure In milky nest, and sip them off at leisure. But not a moment can he there insure them, Nor to such downy rest can he allure them; For down they rush as though they would be free, And drop like hours into eternity.

For so delicious were the words she sung,it seem'd he had loved them a whole summer long.

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

If poetry does not come as naturally as leaves to a tree,
then it better not come at all.

Yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From out dark spirits.

Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....

There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.

Intelligences are atoms of perception -- they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God. How then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them -- so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How, but in the medium of a world like this?

This point I sincerely wish to consider, because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion -- or rather it is a system of Spirit Creation...

I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive -- and yet I think I perceive it -- that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible. I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read. I will call the human heart the hornbook used in that school. And I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and its hornbook.

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....

As various as the lives of men are -- so various become their souls, and thu

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Who alive can say 'Thou art no Poet - mayst not tell thy dreams'? Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved, And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.

What, man, do you mistake the hollow sky For a thronged tavern ... ?

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

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.

No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures
Than I began to think of rhymes and measures:
The air that floated by me seem'd to say
'Write! thou wilt never have a better day.

The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn.

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.

And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

If I am destined to be happy with you here -- how short is the longest Life.

Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer time away.

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

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

I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.

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

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.

Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us.

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.