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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!Vanishd unseasonably
-John Keats
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Adversity
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Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
-John Keats
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Beauty
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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
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Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' -- that is all
Ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/urn.html ...there is no definitive text for this poem. No manuscript in Keats's handwriting survives.
-John Keats, Ode On A Grecian Urn, 1820
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Birds
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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
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Certainty
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I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.
-John Keats
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Charity
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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
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Death
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Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.
-John Keats
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When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
-John Keats
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I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave - thank God for the quiet grave
-John Keats, letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor
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Depression
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I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
-John Keats
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Excellence
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The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
-John Keats
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Experience
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Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
-John Keats
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Failure
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There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.
-John Keats
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I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
-John Keats
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Fame
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Who would wish to be among the commonplace crowd of the little famous -- who are each individually lost in a throng made up of themselves?
-John Keats
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Family
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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
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Fight, Fighting
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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
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Health
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Health is my expected heaven.
-John Keats
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Humanity
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There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify -- so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
-John Keats
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Illusion
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It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
-John Keats
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Imagination
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My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
-John Keats
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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
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Independence
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I equally dislike the favor of the public with the love of a woman -- they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence.
-John Keats
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Last Words
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I always made an awkward bow.
-John Keats
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Books by and about John Keats