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John Keats Quotes

1795–1821 England

John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement.

England
Poets

Also known as: Keats, Keats, John

Random John Keats quote

168 quotes

O, sorrow!
Why dost borrow
Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?

Endymion (1818)

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity.

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made
Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty's self.

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.

The sweet converse of an innocent mind.

Poems (1817)

The music, yearning like a God in pain.

Poems (1820)

The poetry of earth is never dead.

Poems (1817)

His phantasy was lost, where reason fades,
In the calm’d twilight of Platonic shades.

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies.

Poems (1820)

That large utterance of the early gods!

Hyperion: A Fragment (1819)

Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands, together prest.

Poems (1820)

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!

Poems (1820)

Feel we these things? — that moment have we stept
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit's.

Endymion (1818)

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,
Ye have left your souls on earth!
Have ye souls in heaven too,
Double-lived in regions new?

Poems (1820)

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Poems (1820)

I scarcely remember counting upon happiness — I look not for it if it be not in the present hour — nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights, or if a sparrow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.

Letters (1817)

Verse, Fame and beauty are intense indeed,
But Death intenser – Death is life's high mead.

O for ten years, that I may overwhelm
Myself in poesy; so I may do the deed
That my own soul has to itself decreed.

Poems (1817)

Shed no tear! O shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more! O weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root's white core.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Keats (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.