Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John Keats (English Poet)

John Keats (1795–1821) is regarded as one of the greatest English poets. On account of his premature death, he has become the archetype of the young and talented but doomed poet.

Born in the City of London, Keats began training at age 16 to become an apothecary and surgeon but abandoned medicine to pursue poetry. His creative development and literary achievement transpired in an extraordinarily short span. He wrote all of his most famous poems, including “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,” and “To Autumn” in one year, 1818–19, and published them in 1820. His poetry is acclaimed as the culmination of the ideas that marked the English Romantic Movement.

At age 25, Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He traveled to the warmer weather in Italy, hoping to improve his health, but died in Rome. His tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome carries the epitaph that he wrote: “This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be graven on his tombstone, ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’”

Keats’s letters, published in 1848 and 1878, offer insight into his poetic intentions, and are regarded with nearly the veneration given to his poetry; T. S. Eliot called them “the most important ever written by any English poet.”

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Keats

Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise—
Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve.
—John Keats

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.
—John Keats
Topics: Beauty

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
—John Keats
Topics: Dying, Death

I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the best.
—John Keats
Topics: Failure, Fail, Great

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.
—John Keats
Topics: Poets, Poetry, Art

Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
—John Keats

Give me women, wine and snuff Until I cry out hold, enough You may do so san objection Till the day of resurrection; For bless my beard then aye shall be My beloved Trinity.
—John Keats
Topics: Wine

I would jump down Etna for any public good—but I hate a mawkish popularity.
—John Keats
Topics: Popularity

Undescribed sounds, that come a-swooning over hollow grounds, and wither drearily on barren moors.
—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
Topics: Birds

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave
—John Keats
Topics: Death

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
—John Keats
Topics: Adversity

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
—John Keats
Topics: Certainty

I equally dislike the favor of the public with the love of a woman—they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.
—John Keats
Topics: Independence

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
—John Keats
Topics: Excellence

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.
—John Keats
Topics: Poets, Poetry

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

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
—John Keats
Topics: Depression

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!
—John Keats

A proverb is not a proverb to you until life has illustrated it.
—John Keats
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
—John Keats
Topics: Beauty

To one who has been long in city pent,
‘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.
—John Keats

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
—John Keats
Topics: Failure

Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.
—John Keats
Topics: Experience

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.
—John Keats
Topics: Shame

I always made an awkward bow.
—John Keats
Topics: Last Words

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

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.
—John Keats
Topics: Security

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
Topics: Humanity, Human Nature

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.
—John Keats
Topics: Music

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *