“My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep”

—  John Keats

"On Seeing the Elgin Marbles" (1817)
Context: 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.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "My spirit is too weak — mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep" by John Keats?
John Keats photo
John Keats 211
English Romantic poet 1795–1821

Related quotes

David Draiman photo
Alexander the Great photo

“Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.”

Alexander the Great (-356–-323 BC) King of Macedon

As quoted in Alexander the Great (1973) by Robin Lane Fox
Unsourced variant : Only sex and sleep make me conscious that I am mortal.

Emil M. Cioran photo
William Shakespeare photo
Jean Paul Sartre photo

“How fading are the joys we dote upon!
Like apparitions seen and gone.
But those which soonest take their flight
Are the most exquisite and strong,—
Like angels’ visits, short and bright;
Mortality ’s too weak to bear them long.”

John Norris (1657–1711) English theologian, philosopher and poet

The Parting. Compare: "Like those of angels, short and far between", Robert Blair, The Grave, line 588.; "Like angel visits, few and far between", Thomas Campbell, Pleasures of Hope, part ii. line 378.

Charles Lamb photo
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo

“My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

The monster to Robert Walton
Frankenstein (1818)
Source: Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus
Context: I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

Khalil Gibran photo

“The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.”

John The Beloved Disciple In His Old Age: On Jesus The Word
Jesus, The Son of Man (1928)
Context: We are all sons and daughters of the Most High, but the Anointed One was His first-born, who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and He walked among us and we beheld Him.
All this I say that you may understand not only in the mind but rather in the spirit. The mind weighs and measures but it is the spirit that reaches the heart of life and embraces the secret; and the seed of the spirit is deathless.
The wind may blow and then cease, and the sea shall swell and then weary, but the heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.

Rick Riordan photo

Related topics