Letters of John Keats Quotes

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“The world is too brutal for me—I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“Ah! dearest love, sweet home of all my fears,
and hopes, and joys, and panting miseries,
Tonight if I may guess, thy beauty wears a smile of such delight,
As brilliant and as bright
As when with ravished, aching, nassal eyes,
Lost in a soft amaze
I gaze, I gaze”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest Life—I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you for ever.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

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

“For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“Even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“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, Letters of John Keats

“I go amongst the buildings of a city and I see a Man hurrying along - to what?”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“I think poetry should surprise by a fine excess, and not by singularity; it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“It would be vain for me to endeavour after a more reasonable manner of writing to you: I have nothing to speak of but myself - and what can I say but what I feel? If you should have any reason to regret this state of excitement in me, I will turn the tide of your feelings in the right channel by mentioning that it is the only state for the best sort of Poetry -”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“I have been sitting in the Sun whilest I wrote this till it became quite oppressive, this is very odd for January - The vulcan fire is the true natural heat for Winter: the Sun has nothing to do in winter but to give a 'little glooming light much like a Shade' ["the Faerie Queene, I. i. 14. 5]”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats

“I was never afraid of failure;
for I would sooner fail
than not be among the greatest.”
― John Keats, Letters of John Keats