John Keats was an English Romantic poet who, despite a short career, wrote some of the most enduring poetry in the English language. His poetry is characterized by sensual imagery, richly descriptive language, and intellectual depth. Some of his best-known works include “Ode to a Nightingale”, “To Autumn”, and “The Eve of St. Agnes”.
John Keats was an English Romantic poet who, despite his premature death, produced some of the most famous and enduring poetry in the English language. Among his most famous quotes are “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” and “The poetry of earth is never dead.”
John Keats Quotes
John Keats was an English Romantic poet who, despite a short career, wrote some of the most enduring poetry in the English language. His poems are characterized by sensuous natural imagery and passionate expressions of aesthetic experience. Here are some of his most famous quotes:
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness.”
“The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter”
― John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn And Other Poems
“To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.”
― John Keats
John Keats Quotes About Love
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats
“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days – three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“I never was in love – yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.”
― John Keats
“Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.”
― John Keats
“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”
― John Keats
John Keats Quotes Love
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
― John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
― John Keats
“I will clamber through the clouds and exist.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends
“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats
“Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced.”
― John Keats
“And when thou art weary I’ll find thee a bed,
Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems
John Keats Quotes on Love
“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
― John Keats
“Tis “the witching time of night”, / Orbed is the moon and bright, / And the stars they glisten, glisten, / Seeming with bright eyes to listen —”
― John Keats
“The creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.”
― John Keats
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems
“Life is but a day;
A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
From a tree’s summit.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems
John Keats Quotes on Life
“It keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores”
― John Keats
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.”
― John Keats, The Complete Poems
“I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.”
― John Keats
“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
“Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it”
― John Keats
John Keats Quotes About Life
“You are always new. The last of your kisses was even the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.”
― John Keats
“My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.”
― John Keats
“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
― John Keats
“We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.”
― John Keats
“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.”
― John Keats
“You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.”
― John Keats
John Keats Quotes on Beauty
“Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not”
― John Keats
“You are always new. THe last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest. When you pass’d my window home yesterday, I was fill’d with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time…Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk”
“We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.”
― John Keats
“Don’t be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. 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
John Keats Quotes on Nature
“There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music.”
― John Keats
“Thou art a dreaming thing,
A fever of thyself.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one!”
― John Keats
“Now a soft kiss – Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.”
“You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour…”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“The excellence of every Art is its intensity.”
― John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters
John Keats Quotes on Death
“My mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it.”
― John Keats
“I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne
“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”
― John Keats
“I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.”
― John Keats
“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats