I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
JOHN KEATS, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Mar. 13, 1819
- Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
- Is--Love, forgive us!--cinders, ashes, dust;
- Love in a palace is perhaps at last
- More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.
The opinion I have of the generality of women--who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
JOHN KEATS, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Oct. 14, 1818
Is there another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be, we cannot be created for this sort of suffering.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Charles Brown, Sep. 30, 1820
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, letter to James Hessey, Oct. 9, 1818
The music, yearning like a God in pain.
JOHN KEATS, "The Eve of Saint Agnes"
I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave--thank God for the quiet grave--O! I can feel the cold earth upon me--the daisies growing over me--O for this quiet--it will be my first.
JOHN KEATS, attributed, letter from Joseph Severn to John Taylor, Mar. 6, 1821
- Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain
- Clings cruelly to us.
If Poetry comes not as naturally as Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
JOHN KEATS, letter to John Taylor, Feb. 27, 1818
- 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, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles"
- Do not all charms fly
- At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
- O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,
- That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind
- Till it is hush’d and smooth!
O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!
JOHN KEATS, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
- Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
- Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
- Made purple riot.
JOHN KEATS, "The Eve of Saint Agnes"
- To one who has been long in city pent,
- ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
- And open face of heaven.
JOHN KEATS, "To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent"
- "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
- Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
JOHN KEATS, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
- Shed no tear! O shed no tear!
- The flower will bloom another year.
- Weep no more! O weep no more!
- Young buds sleep in the root's white core.
JOHN KEATS, "Faery Songs"
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.
JOHN KEATS, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
- Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain,
- Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies.
JOHN KEATS, "Woman! When I Behold Thee"
- He ne'er is crown'd
- With immortality, who fears to follow
- Where airy voices lead.
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Oct. 8, 1817
That purple-lined palace of sweet sin.
- In spite of all,
- Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
- From our dark spirits.
- Bright star! would I wear steadfast as thou art--
- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
- And watching with eternal lids apart,
- Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
- The moving waters at their priestlike task
- Of pure ablution round earth's human shores.
JOHN KEATS, "Bright Star"
Love is my religion--I could die for that.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Fanny Brawne, Oct. 13, 1819
O aching time! O moments big as years!
JOHN KEATS, "Hyperion: A Fragment"
Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses: we read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
JOHN KEATS, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, May 3, 1818
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Benjamin Bailey, Nov. 22, 1817
- Away! away! I will fly to thee,
- Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
- But on the viewless wings of Poesy.
JOHN KEATS, "Ode to a Nightingale"
There is an old saying "well begun is half done"--'tis a bad one. I would use instead--Not begun at all 'til half done.
JOHN KEATS, letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon, May 10-11, 1817
Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.
JOHN KEATS, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, Mar. 19, 1818
- Stop and consider! life is but a day;
- A fragile dew-drop on its perilous way
- From a tree’s summit.
JOHN KEATS, "Sleep and Poetry"
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
JOHN KEATS, epitaph for himself
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