John Keats Quotes

"Thy plaintive anthem fades / Past the near meadows, over the still stream, / Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep / In the next valley-glades: / Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: - Do I wake or sleep?"

"Though the most beautiful creature were waiting for me at the end of a journey or a walk; though the carpet were of silk, the curtains of the morning clouds; the chairs and sofa stuffed with cygnet's down; the food manna, the wine beyond claret, the window opening on Winander Mere, I should not feel --or rather my happiness would not be so fine, as my solitude is sublime."

"To Sorrow / I bade good-morrow, / And thought to leave her far away behind; / But cheerly, cheerly, / She loves me dearly; / She is so constant to me, and so kind."

"O Sorrow, / Why dost borrow / Heart's lightness from the merriment of May?"

"Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden eyed despairs"

"When I behold, upon the night's starred face, / Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance."

"For sure so fair a place was never seen; Of all that ever charmed romantic eye."

"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."

"It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages; but that is not the thing."

"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"

"I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top."

"The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate."

"What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth."

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."

"The Public - a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility."

"With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration."

"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."

"It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel."

"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."