Quotes from John Keats

Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it

Death is Life's high meed.

Failure is in a sense the highway to success, as each discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true.

Stop and consider! life is but a day

O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

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

I compare human life to a large mansion of many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.

I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.

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.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.

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.

Health is my expected heaven.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for their religion - I have shudder'd at it. I shudder no more. I could be martyr'd for my religion Love is my religion And I could die for that. I could die for you.

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: we know her woof, her texture; she is given in the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, conquer all mysteries by rule and line, empty the haunted air, and gnome mine unweave a rainbow.

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

Away with old Romance! Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts; Away with love-verses, sugar'd in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers; Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide; The unhealthy pleasures, ex

O for the gentleness of old Romance, the simple planning of a minstrel's song!

Give me women, wine and snuff Until I cry out hold, enough You may do so san objection Till the day of resurrection; For bless my beard then aye shall be My beloved Trinity.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

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.

And they are gone: aye, ages long agoThese lovers fled away into the storm.

But strength alone though of the Muses bornIs like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchersDelight it; for it feeds upon the burrsAnd thorns of life; forgetting the great endOf poesy, that it should be a friendTo soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

For to bear all naked truths,And to envisage circumstance, all calm,That is the top of sovereignty.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,Sylvan historian, who canst thus expressA flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape?