Keats Quotes

JOHN KEATS
English poet
(1795 - 1821)

A moment's thought is passion's passing knell.
- [Thought]

A proverb is no proverb to you until life has illustrated it.
- [Proverbs (General)]

Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it 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 eschew.
- [Failure]

And share the inward fragrance of each other's heart.
- [Sympathy]

Death is Life's high meed.
- [Death]

Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.
- [Bees]

Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.
- [Fancy]

Four seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man;
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span;
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring's honey'd-cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven; quiet coves
His soul hath in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness--to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter, too, of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.
- [Life]

Hear we not the hum of mighty workings?
- [Sublimity]

I came to feel how far above
All fancy, pride, and fickle maidenhood,
All earthly pleasure, all imagined good,
Was the warm tremble of a devout kiss.
- [Kisses]

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.
- [Poetry]

If you should have a Boy do not christen him John, and persuade George not to let his partiality for me come across--'T is a bad name, and goes against a Man--If my name had been Edmund I should have been more fortunate--
- in a letter to his sister-in-law, Georgiana Keats, January 13, 1820
[Names]

In the long vista of the years to roll,
Let me not see my country's honor fade;
Oh! let me see our land retain its soul!
Her pride in Freedom, and not Freedom's shade.
- [Freedom]

Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu.
- [Joy]

Let me have music dying, and I seek no more delight.
- [Music]

Mild May's eldest child, the coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
- [Roses]

Music's golden tongue.
- [Music]

Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness.
- [Fear]

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleased eyes, empower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.
- [Sleep]

O! moon old boughs lisp forth a holier din,
The while they feel thine airy fellowship:
Thou dost bless everywhere with silver lip,
Kissing dead things to life.
- [Moon]

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.
- [Poetry]

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.
- [Poetry]

Scenery is fine--but human nature is finer.
- [Human Nature : Scenery]

Silken, chaste, and hushed.
- [Quiet]

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,
And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.
- [Poetry]