Top 300 John Keats Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “To bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty.”

— John Keats

102. “Adieu! adieu! 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?”

— John Keats

103. “Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain Clings cruelly to us.”

— John Keats

104. “What is more gentle than a wind is summer?”

— John Keats

105. “Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself.”

— John Keats

106. “My spirit is too weak – mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.”

— John Keats

107. “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

108. “Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity...”

— John Keats

109. “An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.”

— John Keats

110. “Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.”

— John Keats

111. “There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”

— John Keats

112. “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.”

— John Keats

113. “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.”

— John Keats

114. “Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine – Unweave a rainbow.”

— John Keats

115. “Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not.”

— John Keats

116. “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon and eve’s one star, Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair.”

— John Keats

117. “The roaring of the wind is my wife and the stars through the window pane are my children.”

— John Keats

118. “Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!”

— John Keats

119. “How sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in self defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and riot in things attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after things that are not.”

— John Keats

120. “I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night’s labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.”

— John Keats

121. “That queen of secrecy, the violet.”

— John Keats

122. “Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”

— John Keats

123. “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

124. “No, no, I’m sure, My restless spirit never could endure To brood so long upon one luxury, Unless it did, though fearfully, espy A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.”

— John Keats

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

— John Keats

126. “Where soil is, men grow, Whether to weeds or flowers.”

— John Keats

127. “O for the gentleness of old Romance, the simple planning of a minstrel’s song!”

— John Keats

128. “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

— John Keats

129. “A moment’s thought is passion’s passing knell.”

— John Keats

130. “O, sorrow! Why dost borrow Heart’s lightness from the merriment of May?”

— John Keats

131. “Let us away, my love, with happy speed; There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see, – Drown’d all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead. Awake! arise! my love and fearless be, For o’er the southern moors I have a home for thee.”

— John Keats

132. “We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that “ridicule is the test of truth.””

— John Keats

133. “Music’s golden tongue Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor.”

— John Keats

134. “Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.”

— John Keats

135. “No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.”

— John Keats

136. “A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life, a life like the scriptures, figurative.”

— John Keats

137. “Parting they seemed to tread upon the air, Twin roses by the zephyr blown apart Only to meet again more close.”

— John Keats

138. “I love your hills and I love your dales, And I love your flocks a-bleating; but oh, on the heather to lie together, With both our hearts a-beating!”

— John Keats

139. “But the rose leaves herself upon the brier, For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed.”

— John Keats

140. “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet.”

— John Keats

141. “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.”

— John Keats

142. “Ay, on the shores of darkness there is a light, and precipices show untrodden green; there is a budding morrow in midnight; there is triple sight in blindness keen.”

— John Keats

143. “I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you; everything else tastes like chaff in my mouth.”

— John Keats

144. “You are always new to me.”

— John Keats

145. “I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.”

— John Keats

146. “Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow.”

— John Keats

147. “My friends should drink a dozen of Claret on my Tomb.”

— John Keats

148. “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

149. “Let us open our leaves like a flower, and be passive and receptive.”

— John Keats

150. “I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you.”

— John Keats