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
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 ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
—John Keats
Topics: Imagination, Thrift
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
—John Keats
Topics: Depression
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
I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom—one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.
—John Keats
Topics: Pride
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
Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!
—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
Topics: Fight, Quarrels, Fighting
O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
—John Keats
Topics: Solitude
I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again. My life seems to stop there, I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I ave a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion… I have hudder’d at it… I shudder no more. I could be martyr’d for my religion: Love is my religion. I could die for that. I could die for you. My creed is love, and you are its only tenet. You have ravish’d me away by a power I cannot resist
—John Keats
Topics: Romance, Love
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.
—John Keats
Topics: Truth
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
—John Keats
Topics: Experience
Even if I was well – I must make myself as good a Philosopher as possible. Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake I have found other thoughts intrude upon me. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have lov’d the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember’d.
—John Keats
Topics: Legacy
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
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
—John Keats
Topics: Angels, Philosophy
Love is my religion – I could die for it.
—John Keats
Topics: Love
There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
—John Keats
Topics: Failure
There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.
—John Keats
Topics: Security
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 excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
—John Keats
Topics: Excellence
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
—John Keats
Let me have music dying, and I seek no more delight.
—John Keats
Topics: Music
Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness.
—John Keats
Topics: Autumn
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: Art, Poetry, Poets
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave
—John Keats
Topics: Death
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
—John Keats
Topics: Illusion
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
Topics: Opinion, Opinions
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact’ry,
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 feel 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.
—John Keats
Topics: Death, Dying
Undescribed sounds, that come a-swooning over hollow grounds, and wither drearily on barren moors.
—John Keats
Away with old Romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts; Away with love-verses, sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers; Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide; The unhealthy pleasures, ex
—John Keats
Topics: Romance
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Arthur Henry Hallam English Essayist, Poet
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti British Poet, Artist
- Edward Lear English Humorist, Illustrator
- Matthew Arnold English Poet, Critic
- Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) English Romantic Poet
- A. E. Housman English Scholar, Poet
- Leigh Hunt British Author
- John Donne English Poet, Cleric
- John Milton English Poet
- Thomas Hood British Poet, Humorist
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