Quotes from John Keats

I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love—but if you should deny me the thousand and first—'t would put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity...

The open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown - the Air is our robe of state - the Earth is our throne, and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it.

Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die: And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding Adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee mouths sips:

You are to me an object so intensely desirable that the air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy

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, Endymion This 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)

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death.

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? The transient pleasures as a vision seem, And yet we think the greatest pain's to die.

The two divinest things the world has got— A lovely woman and a rural spot.

But what, without the social thought of thee, Would be the wonders of the sky and sea?