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Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth any cause to wonder that he does not hear it.

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Jun 09, 2026

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We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that 'ridicule is the test of truth.'
John Keats

Quote Author: John Keats

John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work received constant critical attacks from the periodicals of the day, but his posthumous influence on poets such as Alfred Tennyson has been immense. Elaborate word choice and sensual imagery characterize Keats's poetry, including a series of odes that were his masterpieces and which remain among the most popular poems in English literature. Keats's letters, which expound on his aesthetic theory of "negative capability", are among the most celebrated by any writer.

Other John Keats Quotes

Love is my religion - I could die for it.

O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!

He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

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.

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a poem, and to be given away by a novel.

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting and for ever young.

If poetry comes not naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

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.

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Load every rift of your subject with ore.

A hope beyond the shadow of a dream.

For what has made the sage or poet write But the fair paradise of Nature's light.

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles, winking at the brim.

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose, Flushing his brow.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy.

O aching time! O moments big as years.

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave, A paradise for a sect; the savage too From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at Heaven.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.

Every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.

Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies.

Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy To those who woo her with too slavish knees.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.

St. Agnes' Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.

Already with thee! tender is the night.

Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

He play'd an ancient ditty long since mute, In Provence call'd 'La belle dame sans mercy.'

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

Dance and Provençal song and sunburnt mirth! Oh for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene! With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth.

The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled.

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.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced—even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

The eye of the intellect 'sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing.'

He ne'er is crown'd With immortality, who fears to follow Where airy voices lead.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne, Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet Who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.'

In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity.

Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify — so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

Asleep in lap of legends old.

One life,—a little gleam of time between two Eternities.

Literary men are ... a perpetual priesthood.

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

Love in a hut, with water and 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 uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.

Open afresh your rounds of starry folds, Ye ardent Marigolds.

Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?

What is there in thee, Moon! That thou should'st move My heart so potently?

Music's golden tongue Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.

To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents, — the tools to him that can handle them.

How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world improve a sense of its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have know from my infancy — their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy.

And then there crept A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.

E'en like the passage of an angel's tear That falls through the clear ether silently.

What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.

It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.

How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

His religion at best is an anxious wish,—like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.

We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that 'ridicule is the test of truth.'

Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.

Thou, silent form, doth tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

O magic sleep! O comfortable bird, That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind Till it is hush’d and smooth!

So many, and so many, and such glee.

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.

As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden,— 'Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;' or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.

He from forth the closet brought a heap Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd; With jellies soother thank the creamy curd, And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon; Mama and dates, in argosy transferr’d From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one, From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

The stars look very cold about the sky, And I have many miles on foot to fare.

The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing — to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.

As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.

The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide.

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

That large utterance of the early gods!

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.

Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect.

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.

I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom — one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.

I am certain of nothing but the Holiness of the Heart’s affections and the Truth of the Imagination.

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason....

I never can feel certain of any truth, but from a clear perception of its beauty.

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