66 Keats Quotes
Following is our list of the most famous keats quotations and slogans. We've compiled this selection of inspirational keats quotes. Hopefully, these keats quotes will keep you motivated not only during hard times but to expand your keats knowledge!
Quick Jump To
Famous Keats Quotes
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove; In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. — Alfred Lord Tennyson
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. — William Blake
He who kisses joy as it flies by will live in eternity's sunrise. — William Blake
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray
A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness. — John Keats
The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me? — Percy Bysshe Shelley
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being. Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Dance and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth! On for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene! With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth. — John Keats
Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty. — William Shakespeare
Nosegays! leave them for the waking, Throw them earthward where they grew Dim are such, beside the breaking Amaranths he looks unto. Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, when the winds are breathing low, and the stars are shining bright. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern? Have ye tippled drink more fine Than mine host's Canary wine? — John Keats
The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood. — Heinrich Heine
While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep. — Alexander Pope
Nature poets can't walk across the backyard without tripping over an epiphany. — Christian Wiman
Short Keats Quotes
- For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old. — Erica Jong
- Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. — James Russell Lowell
- I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell. — Aravind Adiga
- Mr. Keating: Carpe Diem! Sieze the day! — Robin Williams
- John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on. — J. D. Salinger
People Writing About Keats
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 John Keats |
355 | 3505 |
 Percy Bysshe Shelley |
427 | 3175 |
 William Blake |
469 | 6785 |
 Alfred Lord Tennyson |
477 | 4391 |
 Thomas Gray |
98 | 643 |
 William Shakespeare |
4052 | 36000 |
More Keats Quotes
When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being. — Rose Tremain
Women don't want all that. Women just want a partner who is considerate and attentive, who will spoon with them while reciting Keats, and feed them organic yogurt by candlelight on a seaside cliff at sunset. — Stephen Colbert
I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats. — Margaret Atwood
If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth,' or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea. — Victoria Finlay
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats — Irving Layton
You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life. — Maurice Sendak
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy. — Thom Gunn
The Labor roots are very strong.Paul Keating, made a comment several years ago about looking at that dragging yourself out of poverty, dragging yourself out of that situation. — Warren Mundine
I don't know if I call myself a poet or not. I would like to, but I'm not really qualified to make that decision, because I come in on such a back door, that I don't know what a Robert Frost or a [John] Keats or a T.S. Eliot would really think of my stuff. — Bob Dylan
I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not. — John Keats
I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.' — Anne Waldman
Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping. — Anais Nin
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote! — Wilfred Owen
We have to find a way to not refuse to see where we are, what we are doing, and yet we must still live. And making sure to live - to go through life not around it - was always hard. Making sure to be in the vale of soul - making - as John Keats put it. Now it's insanely hard. — Jorie Graham
Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed. — Alastair Campbell
With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them. — Gregory Orr
Good intentions do not guarantee good results. Somehow Andrew Keates turns works of merit into evenings of entertainment. Don't call him a dramaturge, call him an alchemist. — Paul Gambaccini
As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty. — Garrison Keillor
Truth and Beauty (perhaps Keats was wrong in identifying them: perhaps they have the relation of Wit and Humour, or Rain and Rainbow) are of interest only to hungry people. There are several kinds of hunger. If Socrates, Spinoza, and Santayana had had free access to a midnight icebox we would never have heard of them. Shall I be ashamed of my little mewing truths?... I ask to be forgiven: they are such tiny ones. — Christopher Morley
I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves. — Albert Goldbarth
Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation resembles no book I've read before. If I tell you that it's funny, and moving, and true; that it's as compact and mysterious as a neutron; that it tells a profound story of love and parenthood while invoking (among others) Keats, Kafka, Einstein, Russian cosmonauts, and advice for the housewife of 1896, will you please simply believe me, and read it? — Michael Cunningham
The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakspeare [sic] … Wordsworth … Keats … Chateaubriand … Senancour. — Matthew Arnold
Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats. — Aldous Huxley
Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work. — Mona Simpson
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other peoples backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability. — Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do. — Ben Whishaw
Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. — Robert Wilson Lynd
When I started this song I was still thirty-three The age that Mozart died and sweet Jesus was set free Keats and Shelley too soon finished, Charley Parker would be And I fantasized some tragedy'd be soon curtailing me Well just today I had my birthday I made it thirty-four Mere mortal, not immortal, not star-crossed anymore I've got this problem with my aging I no longer can ignore A tame and toothless tabby can't produce a lion's roar. — Harry Chapin
Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become. — Amy Lowell
This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don’t drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing. — Natalie
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there. — Michael Cunningham
There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way. — Jane Campion
It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all. — Jane Campion
Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me. — Jane Campion
We have chosen to write the biography of our disease because we love it platonically - as Amy Lowell loved Keats - and have sought its acquaintance wherever we could find it. And in this growing intimacy we have become increasingly impressed with the influence that this and other infectious diseases, which span - in their protoplasmic continuities - the entire history of mankind, have had upon the fates of men. — Hans Zinsser
What I deeply want... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self. — Coleman Barks
To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity. — George Gissing
Over the Christmas period, I spent time with both Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and you listen to stories and tales of how hard it can be when it's really hard, and I think we easily all talk ourselves into the proposition that it's never been as hard as this. Well it's been hard in the past. It's been really hard. So you keep doing it and, the more you do it, the more you gain strength and confidence that you can do it. — Julia Gillard
Peter Keating: "Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you. Everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable-and unimportant?" | Howard Roark: "No." — Ayn Rand
Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge. — John B. S. Haldane
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of keats quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about keats to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of keats quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
Embed HTML Link
Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage