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

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

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