Keats Time Quotes & Sayings

Think of my Pleasure in Solitude, in comparison of my commerce with the world - there I am a child - there they do not know me not even my most intimate acquaintance - I give into their feelings as though I were refraining from irritating a little child - Some think me middling, others silly, other foolish - every one thinks he sees my weak side against my will; when in thruth it is with my will - I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so graet a resource. This is one great reason why they like me so; because they can all show to advantage in a room, and eclipese from a certain tact one who is reckoned to be a good Poet - I hope I am not here playing tricks 'to make the angels weep': I think not: for I have not the least contempt for my species; and though it may sound paradoxical: my greatest elevations of Soul leave me every time more humbled - Enough of this - though in your Love for me you will not think it enough. — John Keats

Each of us needs something of an island in his life - if not an actual island, at least some place, or space in time, in which to be himself, free to cultivate his differences from others. — John Keats

How many consuming fires can there be in the words: freedom, peace and democracy and how easy they can be extinguished by ignorance, stupidity and arrogance? — Sorin Cerin

Life is but a day:
A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way
From a tree's summit — John Keats

To me, one of the greatest triumphs in doing a book is to tell the story as simply as possible. My aim is to imply rather than to overstate. Whenever the reader participates with his own interpretation, I feel that the book is much more successful. I write with the premise that less is more. Writing is not difficult to me. I read into a tape recorder, constantly dropping a word here and there from my manuscript until I get a minimum amount of words to say exactly what I want to say. Each time I drop a word or two, it brings me a sense of victory! — Ezra Jack Keats

Literary history and the present are dark with silences ... I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences
what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)
that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. — Tillie Olsen

If I should die, 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. — John Keats

By the very notion that God does not exist an atheist embodies the idea of a supreme being by pondering the very existence he wishes to refute. How can you refute something you don't believe in? Just arguing against the nature of something implies it has attributes, which then must be recognized because only something that exists has these characteristic traits. Even if the idea of no God exists in the non-believers mind, his thoughts make him more insidious than those proffesing to believe because the idea of a God is now planted in his mind and he spends all his time dwelling on the nature of something that doesn't exist, giving creation to the very thing he opposes, he has constructed his own God and it haunts him because it is with him daily as a nagging and bitter irony, that his very own mind has created, god who shall dwell within him embittering and confounding him in perpetuity. — Tom Hamilton

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. — John Keats

When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait, and obey." Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being. — Rose Tremain

Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams
The summer time away. — John Keats

The opinion I have of the generality of women
who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in. — John Keats

Historically, discoveries of pure science are slow to reach the mainstream compared with those of the applied sciences, which noisily announce themselves with new medicines and gadgets. The Hubble has proved an exception, remaking, in a single generation, the popular conception of the universe. It has accomplished this primarily through the aesthetic force of its discoveries, which distill the difficult abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats's famous couplet: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." Though philosophy has hardly registered it, the Hubble has given us nothing less than an ontological awakening, a forceful reckoning with what is. The telescope compels the mind to contemplate space and time on a scale just shy of the infinite. — Ross Andersen

Time, that aged nurse, rocked me to patience. — John Keats

For many a time I have been half in love with easeful death. Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath — John Keats

I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves. — Albert Goldbarth

Stricken down with consumption in 1819, Keats, after weeks in bed, wrote to Fanny Brawne: "Now I have had opportunities of passing nights anxious and awake, I have found thoughts obtrude upon me.'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.'" "If I had had time" - this is the tragedy of all great men. Keats never wrote anything of importance after that; nevertheless, his friends are remembered because of him, and he has left behind him poems as immortal as English, and more perfect than Shakespeare.We — Will Durant

What I deeply want ... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self. — Coleman Barks

It's challenging to find an identity as a young person if you don't have the sustenance of love, because you're being shipped around. — Mary J. Blige

In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne'er remember Apollo's summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time. — John Keats

That men, who might have tower'd in the van
Of all the congregated world, to fan
And winnow from the coming step of time
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men-slugs and human serpentry,
Have been content to let occasion die,
Whilst they did sleep in love's Elysium. — John Keats

What occasions the greater part of the world's quarrels? Simply this: Two minds meet and do not understand each other in time enough to prevent any shock of surprise at the conduct of either party. — John Keats

What had John Keats said about Negative Capability - holding two opposite ideas in one's mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them? — Dan Simmons

O aching time! O moments big as years! — John Keats

This isn't a book that I could have written ten years ago. And as much as I'd love to credit that to my growth as a writer, I know it's not really that. Instead it's because of all the people I've met and talked to as an author. And, just as important, it's about all of the things I've been exposed to as a reader, particularly of YA fiction. I am so lucky to be a part of a community of writers that constantly inspires me to write whatever I want to write, no matter how hard it seems. My peers are my role models, and my role models are my peers. Which is extraordinary. Thanks — David Levithan

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone. — Annie Dillard

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. — John Keats

The splendors of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;
Like stars to their appointed height they climb
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Land, in England, is valuable, because we have highly-paid artisans to consume the produce on the spot. — Joseph Hume

Tis "the witching time of night", / Orbed is the moon and bright, / And the stars they glisten, glisten, / Seeming with bright eyes to listen - — John Keats

O that our dreamings all, of sleep or wake,
Would all their colours from the sunset take:
From something of material sublime,
Rather than shadow our own soul's day-time
In the dark void of night. For in the world
We jostle, - but my flag is not unfurl'd ... — John Keats

Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death. — John Keats