The Quotation Society

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“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats

Source
Ode on a Grecian Urn, written 1819, published 1820
Written
1819

About this quotation

The closing couplet is famously ambiguous: editors disagree about whether the urn speaks the whole couplet or only the words in quotation marks. Keats wrote the ode in the spring of 1819, and it appeared in his 1820 volume.

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