John Keats
Poet
1795-10-31
Quotes by John Keats
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Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth's human shores,Or gazing on the new soft-fallen maskOf snow upon the mountains and the moors--No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,And so live ever--or else swoon to death. Glanzvoller Stern! wär ich so stet wie du,Nicht hing ich nachts in einsam stolzer Pracht!SchautŽ nicht mit ewigem Blick beiseite zu,Einsiedler der Natur, auf hoher WachtBeim Priesterwerk der Reinigung, das die See,Die wogende, vollbringt am Meeresstrand;Noch starrt ich auf die Maske, die der SchneeSanft fallend frisch um Berg und Moore band.Nein, doch unwandelbar und unentwegtMöchtŽ ruhn ich an der Liebsten weicher Brust,Zu fühlen, wie es wogend dort sich regt,Zu wachen ewig in unruhiger Lust,Zu lauschen auf des Atems sanftes Wehen -So ewig leben - sonst im Tod vergehen!
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Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced.
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Scenery is fine -but human nature is finer
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The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mindabout nothing -- to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
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I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
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But this is human life: the war, the deeds, The disappointment, the anxiety, Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,All human; bearing in themselves this good, That they are still the air, the subtle food, To make us feel existence. -Keats, EndymionThis is the —goal' of the soul path – to feel existence; not to overcome life's struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context. (Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, p.260)
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O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake, Would all their colours from the sunset take.
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Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors by somebody I do not know.
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No one can usurp the heights...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.
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Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.
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Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity...
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I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.
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The same that oft-times hath charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.
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I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.
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I do think the barsThat kept my spirit in are burst - that IAm sailing with thee through the dizzy sky!How beautiful thou art!
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Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shellsWith a sweet kernel; to set budding more,And still more, later flowers for the bees,Until they think warm days will never cease,For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.
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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.
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Pensive they sit, and roll their languid eyes.
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Open wide the mind's cage-door,She'll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
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The poetry of the earth is never dead.
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