John Keats: Quotes about love

John Keats was English Romantic poet. Explore interesting quotes on love.
John Keats: 422 quotes39 likes

“My love is selfish. I cannot breathe without you.”

John Keats

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!”

John Keats

then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
"When I have fears that I may cease to be" (1817)
Source: The Complete Poems

“To Sorrow
I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.”

John Keats

Bk. IV, l. 173
Endymion (1818)
Source: The Complete Poems
Context: To Sorrow
I bade good-morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind:
I would deceive her
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.

“I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.”

John Keats

To Fanny Brawne (c. February 1820)
Letters (1817–1820)
Context: "If I should die," said I to myself, "I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered."

“Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams,
Lover of loneliness, and wandering,
Of upcast eye, and tender pondering!
Thee must I praise above all other glories
That smile us on to tell delightful stories.”

John Keats

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Let us away, my love, with happy speed;
There are no ears to hear, or eyes to see,
- Drown'd all in Rhenish and the sleepy mead.
Awake! arise! my love and fearless be,
For o'er the southern moors I have a home for thee.”

John Keats

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: The Complete Poems
Context: Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.”

John Keats Ode to a Nightingale

Stanza 6
Poems (1820), Ode to a Nightingale
Source: Complete Poems and Selected Letters

“When shall we pass a day alone? 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 - 'twould put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.”

John Keats

Source: Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Tis the pest
Of love, that fairest joys give most unrest.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. II, l. 365
Endymion (1818)

“Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is — Love, forgive us! — cinders, ashes, dust.”

John Keats Lamia

"Lamia", Pt. II, l. 1
Poems (1820)

“And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!”

John Keats Ode to Psyche

"Ode to Psyche", st. 5
Poems (1820)

“And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. I, l. 20
Endymion (1818)

“I begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and weakness. 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 (October 9, 1818)
Letters (1817–1820)

“Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half-heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation—balmy pain.”

John Keats

I stood tip-toe upon a little Hill; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.”

John Keats book La Belle Dame sans Merci

Stanza V
La Belle Dame sans Merci (1819)