Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
—John Keats
Topics: Philosophy, Angels
The poetry of the earth is never dead.
—John Keats
Topics: Poetry
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
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?
—John Keats
Topics: Charity
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
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
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
I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the best.
—John Keats
Topics: Failure, Great, Fail
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave – thank God for the quiet grave.
—John Keats
Topics: Death
Let me have music dying, and I seek no more delight.
—John Keats
Topics: Music
The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.
—John Keats
Topics: Family
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: Thrift, Imagination
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
Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by someone I do not know. I admire lolling on a lawn by a water-lilied pond to eat white currants and see goldfish: and go to the fair in the evening if I’m good. There is not hope for that—one is sure to get into some mess before evening.
—John Keats
Topics: Pleasure
I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
—John Keats
Topics: Lawyers, Law
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
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: Poetry, Poets
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, Art, Poetry
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
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: Quarrels, Fighting, Fight
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
What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth.
—John Keats
Topics: Truth
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
—John Keats
Topics: Excellence
Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
—John Keats
Topics: Death, Dying
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.
—John Keats
Topics: Certainty
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
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 afterward carefully avoid.
—John Keats
Topics: Adversity, Difficulties, Failure, Failures, Success & Failure, Mistakes
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
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
—John Keats
Topics: Depression
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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