Top 300 John Keats Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”

— John Keats

252. “Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance”.”

— John Keats

253. “In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne’er remember Their green felicity.”

— John Keats

254. “I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.”

— John Keats

255. “I never can feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its beauty.”

— John Keats

256. “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

— John Keats

257. “I never was in love – yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.”

— John Keats

258. “The genius of Shakespeare was an innate university.”

— John Keats

259. “What occasions the greater part of the world’s quarrels? Simply this: Two minds meet and do not understand each other in time enough to prevent any shock of surprise at the conduct of either party.”

— John Keats

260. “But were there ever any Writhed not at passed joy?”

— John Keats

261. “How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms – the difference is amazing Love. Death must come at last; Man must die, as Shallow says; but before that is my fate I fain would try what more pleasures than you have given, so sweet a creature as you can give.”

— John Keats

262. “In passing however I must say of one thing that has pressed upon me lately and encreased my Humility and capability of submission and that is this truth – Men of Genius are great as certain ethereal Chemicals operating on the Mass of neutral intellect – but they have not any individuality, any determined Character – I would call the top and head of those who have a proper self Men of Power.”

— John Keats

263. “I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world.”

— John Keats

264. “There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load of immortality.”

— John Keats

265. “My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you.”

— John Keats

266. “I always made an awkward bow.”

— John Keats

267. “You dazzled me. There is nothing in the world so bright and delicate.”

— John Keats

268. “I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along – to what?”

— John Keats

269. “The two divinest things the world has got – A lovely woman and a rural spot.”

— John Keats

270. “She press’d his hand in slumber; so once more He could not help but kiss her and adore.”

— John Keats

271. “A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”

— John Keats

272. “Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.”

— John Keats

273. “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

274. “I have nothing to speak of but my self-and what can I say but what I feel.”

— John Keats

275. “Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment – upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses.”

— John Keats

276. “I could centre my Happiness in you, I cannot expect to engross your heart so entirely – indeed if I thought you felt as much for me as I do for you at this moment I do not think I could restrain myself from seeing you again tomorrow for the delight of one embrace. But no – I must live upon hope and Chance. In case of the worst that can happen, I shall still love you – but what hatred shall I have for another!”

— John Keats

277. “Asleep in lap of legends old.”

— John Keats

278. “Young playmates of the rose and daffodil, Be careful ere ye enter in, to fill Your baskets high With fennel green, and balm, and golden pines Savory latter-mint, and columbines.”

— John Keats

279. “And how they kist each other’s tremulous eyes.”

— John Keats

280. “How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they.”

— John Keats

281. “A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.”

— John Keats

282. “Where are you now? How are the nymphs? I suppose they have led you a fine dance.”

— John Keats

283. “Neither poetry, nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of countenance as they pass by me.”

— John Keats

284. “Their woes gone by, and both to heaven upflown, To bow for gratitude before Jove’s throne.”

— John Keats

285. “Every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.”

— John Keats

286. “Why employ intelligent and highly paid ambassadors and then go and do their work for them? You don’t buy a canary and sing yourself.”

— John Keats

287. “And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?”

— John Keats

288. “We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.”

— John Keats

289. “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

290. “Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.”

— John Keats

291. “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!”

— John Keats

292. “The uttered part of a man’s life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.”

— John Keats

293. “Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.”

— John Keats

294. “Let the winged Fancy roam Pleasure never is at home.”

— John Keats

295. “I came to feel how far above All fancy, pride, and fickle maidenhood, All earthly pleasure, all imagined good, Was the warm tremble of a devout kiss.”

— John Keats

296. “I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment – upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses.”

— John Keats

297. “It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man’s life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.”

— John Keats

298. “I was too much in solitude, and consequently was obliged to be in continual burning of thought, as an only resource.”

— John Keats

299. “The Public – a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.”

— John Keats

300. “I can bear to die – I cannot bear to leave her.”

— John Keats