■Famous Quotes by Famous Poets
William Shakespeare Quotes
"A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."
Dante Alighieri Quotes
"Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows."
"Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."
"For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense."
"Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always."
"Small projects need much more help than great."
"The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come."
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
"The secret of getting things done is to act!"
"We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all."
Lord Byron Quotes
"A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know."
"A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress."
"A mistress never is nor can be a friend. While you agree, you are lovers; and when it is over, anything but friends."
"A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins."
"A wise man more than laughter from a dunce."
"A woman should never be seen eating or drinking, unless it be lobster salad and Champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands."
"Absence - that common cure of love."
"Adversity is the first path to truth."
"Alas! how deeply painful is all payment!"
"All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin."
"America is a model of force and freedom and moderation - with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people."
"And yet a little tumult, now and then, is an agreeable quickener of sensation; such as a revolution, a battle, or an adventure of any lively description."
"As falls the dew on quenchless sands, blood only serves to wash ambition's hands."
"As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others."
"Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray."
"Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge."
"But - Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?"
"But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of."
"But words are things, and a small drop of ink,Falling like dew, upon a thought, producesThat which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
"Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep."
"Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it."
"Fame is the thirst of youth."
"Folly loves the martyrdom of fame."
"Fools are my theme, let satire be my song."
"For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour."
"For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear."
"For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction."
"Friendship is Love without his wings!"
"He scratched his ear, the infallible resource to which embarrassed people have recourse."
"He who is only just is cruel. Who on earth could live were all judged justly?"
"He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below."
"Her great merit is finding out mine - there is nothing so amiable as discernment."
"I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness."
"I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting."
"I am always most religious upon a sunshiny day."
"I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains."
"I do detest everything which is not perfectly mutual."
"I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned."
"I have a notion that gamblers are as happy as most people, being always excited; women, wine, fame, the table, even ambition, sate now and then, but every turn of the card and cast of the dice keeps the gambler alive - besides one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else."
"I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves."
"I have always laid it down as a maxim -and found it justified by experience -that a man and a woman make far better friendships than can exist between two of the same sex -but then with the condition that they never have made or are to make love to each other."
"I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all."
"I have had, and may have still, a thousand friends, as they are called, in life, who are like one's partners in the waltz of this world -not much remembered when the ball is over."
"I have no consistency, except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether."
"I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure."
"I love not man the less, but Nature more."
"I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone."
"I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail."
"I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor."
"If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company."
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad."
"If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver."
"In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue - is hypocrisy."
"In short, he was a perfect cavaliero, and to his very valet seemed a hero."
"In solitude, where we are least alone."
"It is odd but agitation or contest of any kind gives a rebound to my spirits and sets me up for a time."
"It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe -you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep."
"It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it."
"John Adams lies here, of the parish of Southwell, a carrier who carried his can to his mouth well; he carried so much, and he carried so fast, he could carry no more - so was carried at last; for the liquor he drank, being too much for one, he could not carry off - so he's now carri-on."
"Keep thy smooth words and juggling homilies for those who know thee not."
"Let none think to fly the danger for soon or late love is his own avenger."
"Let these describe the indescribable."
"Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim."
"Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life."
"Lovers may be - and indeed generally are - enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations."
"Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms."
"Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication."
"Man's love is of man's life a part; it is a woman's whole existence. In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love."
"Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men."
"Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure."
"Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers."
"My attachment has neither the blindness of the beginning, nor the microscopic accuracy of the close of such liaisons."
"My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years months days hours or minutes remain that Carpe Diem is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds-for who can trust to tomorrow?"
"My turn of mind is so given to taking things in the absurd point of view, that it breaks out in spite of me every now and then."
"No ear can hear nor tongue can tell the tortures of the inward hell!"
"O Fame! if I e'er took delight in thy praises, 'Twas less for the sake of thy high-sounding phrases, Than to see the bright eyes of the dear one discover The thought that I was not unworthy to love her."
"Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead, adorer of the ruin, comforter and only healer when the heart hath bled... Time, the avenger!"
"Oh! there is an organ playing in the street - a waltz too! I must leave off to listen."
"One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other."
"Opinions are made to be changed -or how is truth to be got at?"
"Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people."
"Posterity will never survey a nobler grave than this: here lie the bones of Castlereagh: stop, traveler, and piss."
"Prolonged endurance tames the bold."
"Ready money is Aladdin's lamp."
"Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore."
"Society is now one polished horde, formed of two mighty tries, the Bores and Bored."
"Sometimes we are less unhappy in being deceived by those we love, than in being undeceived by them."
"Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest, the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life."
"Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world."
"The 'good old times' - all times when old are good."
"The Angels were all singing out of tune, and hoarse with having little else to do, excepting to wind up the sun and moon or curb a runaway young star or two."
"The beginning of atonement is the sense of its necessity."
"The best way will be to avoid each other without appearing to do so - or if we jostle, at any rate not to bite."
"The busy have no time for tears."
"The Cardinal is at his wit's end - it is true that he had not far to go."
"The dead have been awakened - shall I sleep? The world's at war with tyrants - shall I crouch? the harvest's ripe - and shall I pause to reap? I slumber not; the thorn is in my couch; Each day a trumpet soundeth in mine ear, its echo in my heart."
"The dew of compassion is a tear."
"The king-times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it."
"The place is very well and quiet and the children only scream in a low voice."
"The poor dog, in life the firmest friend. The first to welcome, foremost to defend."
"The power of Thought, the magic of the Mind!"
"The tenor's voice is spoilt by affectation, And for the bass, the beast can only bellow; In fact, he had no singing education, An ignorant, noteless, timeless, tuneless fellow."
"The way to be immortal (I mean not to die at all) is to have me for your heir. I recommend you to put me in your will and you will see that (as long as I live at least) you will never even catch cold."
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roarI love not Man the less, but Nature more."
"There is no instinct like that of the heart."
"There is something pagan in me that I cannot shake off. In short, I deny nothing, but doubt everything."
"There is, in fact, no law or government at all [in Italy]; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them."
"There's naught, no doubt, so much the spirit calms as rum and true religion."
"They never fail who die in a great cause."
"This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving souls. All propagated with the best intentions."
"This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And leaving nothing, yet hath all."
"This sort of adoration of the real is but a heightening of the beau ideal."
"Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves."
"Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure."
"'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't."
"'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it."
"To chase the glowing hours with flying feet."
"To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin."
"To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all."
"Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction."
"War's a brain spattering windpipe splitting art."
"We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive."
"What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A bubble of seed which may be spilt in a whore's lap, or in the orgasm of a voluptuous dream, might (for aught we know) have formed a Caesar or a Bonaparte - there is nothing remarkable recorded of their sires, that I know of."
"What an antithetical mind! - tenderness, roughness - delicacy, coarseness - sentiment, sensuality - soaring and groveling, dirt and deity - all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!"
"What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little."
"What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life's page, And be alone on earth, as I am now."
"When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse."
"When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it."
"Where there is mystery, it is generally suspected there must also be evil."
"Who loves, raves."
"Who tracks the steps of glory to the grave?"
"Why did she love him? Curious fool - be still - is human love the growth of human will?"
"Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?"
"Yes, love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire with angels shared, by Allah given to lift from earth our low desire."
"Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, streams like the thunderstorm against the wind."
"Your letter of excuses has arrived. I receive the letter but do not admit the excuses except in courtesy, as when a man treads on your toes and begs your pardon - the pardon is granted, but the joint aches, especially if there is a corn upon it."
Hermann Hesse Quotes
"All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened."
"Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke."
"Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud."
"I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value."
"It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is."
"Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin."
"Those who cannot think or take responsibility for themselves need, and clamor for, a leader."
"When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane."
E. E. Cummings Quotes
"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long."
"America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still."
"At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks."
"Be of love a little more careful than of anything."
"Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink."
"I imagine that yes is the only living thing."
"I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more."
"I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes."
"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."
"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart."
"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."
"It takes three to make a child."
"Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination."
"Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own."
"The earth laughs in flowers."
"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."
"The sensual mysticism of entire vertical being."
"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."
"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."
Geoffrey Chaucer Quotes
"And she was fayr as is the rose in May."
"Certes, they been lye to hounds, for an hound when he cometh by the roses, or by other bushes, though he may nat pisse, yet wole he heve up his leg and make a countenance to pisse."
"First he wrought, and afterward he taught."
"He was a verray, parfit gentil knyght."
"Love is blind."
"Nowhere so busy a man as he than he, and yet he seemed busier than he was."
"People can die of mere imagination."
"The bisy larke, messager of day."
"The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people."
"The guilty think all talk is of themselves."
"There's never a new fashion but it's old."
"Time and tide wait for no man."
"We know little of the things for which we pray."
Jean Cocteau Quotes
"A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system."
"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."
"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."
"After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."
"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."
"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."
"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."
"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."
"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."
"Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go to far."
"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."
"Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs."
"Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels."
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."
"He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world."
"Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live."
"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."
"I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?"
"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."
"If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it."
"If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas."
"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator."
"It is not I who become addicted, it is my body."
"Life is a horizontal fall."
"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."
"Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity."
"One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."
"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."
"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."
"Silence moves faster when it's going backward."
"Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying."
"Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically."
"Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far."
"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."
"Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature."
"That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier's wrist."
"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."
"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee."
"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head."
"The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders."
"The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends."
"The poet doesn't invent. He listens."
"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth."
"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."
"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."
"The trouble about the Academie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed."
"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."
"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."
"There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them."
"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard."
"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."
"Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Vistor Hugo."
"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"
"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."
"What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."
"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."
"You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
T. S. Eliot Quotes
"A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good."
"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."
"And we must think no further of you."
"Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity."
"Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express."
"April is the cruellest month."
"As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing."
"At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths -your abilities and your failings."
"Business today consists in persuading crowds."
"Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden."
"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them."
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality."
"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."
"I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates."
"I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different."
"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
"I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music."
"If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?"
"If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it.""
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
"In my beginning is my end."
"It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome."
"It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words."
"Let's not be narrow, nasty, and negative."
"My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down."
"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
"Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment."
"Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature."
"People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events."
"Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to."
"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
"Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."
"So the lover must struggle for words."
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
"Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome."
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."
"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason."
"The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first."
"The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible."
"The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it."
"There is no method but to be very intelligent."
"There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him."
"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper."
"This love is silent."
"Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values."
"We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion."
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from."
"Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?"
"Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
"You are the music while the music lasts."
Robert Frost Quotes
"A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain."
"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity."
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age."
"A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."
"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
"A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes."
"A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body - the wishbone."
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
"A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom."
"A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair."
"A successful lawsuit is the one worn by a policeman."
"Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with."
"And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."
"And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."
"Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of mostly men is especially so."
"But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep."
"By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day."
"College is a refuge from hasty judgment."
"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."
"Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard."
"Education is hanging around until you've caught on."
"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
"For fear it would make me conservative when old."
"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."
"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me."
"Freedom lies in being bold."
"Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it."
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."
"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."
"Humor is the most engaging cowardice."
"I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."
"I always entertain great hopes."
"I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn."
"I am glad the invitation pleases your family. It will please my family to the fourth generation and my family of friends and, were they living, it would have pleased inordinately the kind of Grover Cleveland Democrats I had for parents."
"I had a lovers quarrel with the world."
"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."
"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
"I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old."
"I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power."
"I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."
"I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed."
"If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving."
"If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom."
"If you don't know how great this country is, I know someone who does; Russia."
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
"Is due to truths being in and out of favor."
"It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married."
"Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on."
"Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power."
"Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
"Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market."
"Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor."
"My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane."
"No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard."
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
"Nobody was ever meant, To remember or invent, What he did with every cent."
"One aged man - one man - can't fill a house."
"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
"Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance."
"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."
"Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things."
""Skepticism," is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, "Well, what have we here?""
"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice."
"Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward."
"Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on."
"Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second."
"The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise."
"The best way out is always through."
"The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office."
"The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything."
"The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader."
"The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat."
"The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."
"The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended-and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended."
"The jury consist of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer."
"The middle of the road is where the white line is - and that's the worst place to drive."
"The only way round is through."
"The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work."
"The snake stood up for evil in the Garden."
"The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination."
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."
"The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."
"The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism."
"There is no arguing with him, for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it."
"There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man-fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them."
"They would not find me changed from him they knew - only more sure of all I thought was true."
"Thinking isn't agreeing or disagreeing. That's voting."
"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."
"To be social is to be forgiving."
"Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
"Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar."
"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows."
"What is this talked-of mystery of birth. But being mounted bareback on the earth?"
"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
"You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country."
"You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider."
"You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's."
"You have freedom when you're easy in your harness."
Tu Fu Quotes
"After the separation of death one can eventually swallow back one's grief, but the separation of the living is an endless, unappeasable anxiety."
"Imperishable renown is cold comfort when you can only enjoy it in the tomb!"
Victor Hugo Quotes
"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."
"A faith is a necessity to a man. Woe to him who believes in nothing."
"A library implies an act of faith."
"A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor."
"A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement - in a word, with more renunciation than you care for - and so you flee the contagion."
"Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters."
"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise."
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."
"Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book."
"As the purse is emptied, the heart is filled."
"At the shrine of friendship never say die, let the wine of friendship never run dry."
"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."
"Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings."
"But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don't always succeed."
"Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees."
"Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?"
"Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit."
"Common sense is in spite of, not as the result of education."
"Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery."
"Each man should frame life so that at some future hour fact and his dreaming meet."
"Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left."
"Fashions have done more harm than revolutions."
"Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age."
"Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite."
"Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers."
"Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come."
"Habit is the nursery of errors."
"Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace."
"Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murders. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls."
"He who opens a school door, closes a prison."
"He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life."
"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly."
"Hope is the word which God has written on the brow of every man."
"How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said."
"Human intelligence discovered a way of perpetuating itself, one not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier."
"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."
"I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul."
"Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach."
"Initiative is doing the right thing without being told."
""Is there no hope?" the sick man said, The silent doctor shook his head, And took his leave with signs of sorrow, Despairing of his fee to-morrow."
"It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life."
"It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe."
"Joy's smile is much closer to tears than laughter."
"Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face."
"Liberation is not deliverance."
"Life is the flower for which love is the honey."
"Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other."
"Most commonly revolt is born of material circumstances; but insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Revolt is Masaniello, who led the Neapolitan insurgents in 1647; but insurrection is Spartacus. Insurrection is a thing of the spirit, revolt is a thing of the stomach."
"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."
"My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic."
"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul."
"No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child."
"Nothing else in the world... not all the armies... is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."
"One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas."
"One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation."
"Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds."
"Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime."
"Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander."
"Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause."
"The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced."
"The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhammadanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity."
"The first symptom of love in a young man is timidity; in a girl boldness."
"The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves."
"The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human."
"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves."
"There are fathers who do not love their children; there is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson."
"There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees."
"There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling."
"There is no such thing as a little country. The greatness of a people is no more determined by their numbers than the greatness of a man is by his height."
"There is nothing like a dream to create the future."
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time as come."
"Thought is the labor of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure."
"To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark."
"To love another person is to see the face of God."
"To love beauty is to see light."
"To think of shadows is a serious thing."
"Toleration is the best religion."
"Try as you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic of the human heart, love."
"We are on the side of religion as opposed to religions, and we are among those who believe in the wretched inadequacy of sermons and the sublimity of prayer."
"When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind."
"When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right."
"When grace is joined with wrinkles, it is adorable. There is an unspeakable dawn in happy old age."
"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
"Wisdom is a sacred communion."
"You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag."
John Keats Quotes
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness."
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
"Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?"
"He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead."
"Health is my expected heaven."
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination."
"I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top."
"I equally dislike the favor of the public with the love of a woman - they are both a cloying treacle to the wings of independence."
"I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more - I could be martyred for my religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that."
"I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest."
"It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel."
"Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever."
"Love in a hut, with water and a crust, is - Lover, forgive us! - cinders, ashes, dust."
"Love is my religion - I could die for it."
"Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen."
"My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk."
"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."
"Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss."
"O fret not after knowledge - I have none, and yet my song comes native with the warmth. O fret not after knowledge - I have none, and yet the Evening listens."
"O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings."
"O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delvid earth."
"Pass into nothingness."
"Philosophy will clip an angel's wings."
"Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."
"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."
"Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer."
"She press'd his hand in slumber; so once more He could not help but kiss her and adore."
"The poetry of the earth is never dead."
"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."
"There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music."
"What the imagination seizes as beauty must be the truth."
"When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain."
"Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
"A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books."
"A thought often makes us hotter than a fire."
"A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child."
"Ah, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend."
"Ah, how skillful grows the hand that obeyeth love's command! It is the heart and not the brain that to the highest doth attain, and he who followeth love's behest far excelleth all the rest."
"Ah! what would the world be to us If the children were no more? We should dread the desert behind us Worse than the dark before."
"All things come round to him who will but wait."
"All things must change to something new, to something strange."
"Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied."
"And yet not turn your back upon the world."
"Build today, then strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure. Shall tomorrow find its place."
"Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author."
"Doubtless criticism was originally benignant, pointing out the beauties of a work rather that its defects. The passions of men have made it malignant, as a bad heart of Procreates turned the bed, the symbol of repose, into an instrument of torture."
"Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose."
"Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad."
"Evil is only good perverted."
"Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny."
"For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."
"For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art."
"Give what you have to somebody, it may be better than you think."
"He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce."
"Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night."
"However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure."
"I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth."
"I have an affection for a great city. I feel safe in the neighborhood of man, and enjoy the sweet security of the streets."
"I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn."
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
"If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody."
"If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it."
"In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer."
"Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find."
"Into each life some rain must fall."
"It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun."
"It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar."
"It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong."
"Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose."
"Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong."
"Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul."
"Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are."
"Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time."
"Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart."
"Love gives itself; it is not bought."
"Love keeps the cold out better than a cloak."
"Man is always more than he can know of himself; consequently, his accomplishments, time and again, will come as a surprise to him."
"Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed To have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads."
"Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies."
"Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions."
"Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat."
"Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat."
"Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
"Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."
"People demand freedom only when they have no power."
"Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody."
"Resolve and thou art free."
"Sail on ship of state, sail on, I union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, is hanging on thy fate!"
"Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence."
"Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels."
"Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity."
"Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind."
"Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death."
"Something attempted, something done, Has earned a nights repose."
"Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues."
"Talk not of wasted affection - affection never was wasted."
"That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain."
"The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain."
"The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art."
"The grave is but a covered bridge Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!"
"The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy."
"The heights by great men reached and keptWere not obtained by sudden flight,But they, while their companions sleptWere toiling upward in the night."
"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books."
"The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds."
"The morning pouring everywhere, its golden glory on the air."
"The nearer the dawn the darker the night."
"The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain."
"The secret anniversaries of the heart."
"The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."
"The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized."
"The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after."
"There is nothing holier, in this life of ours, than the first consciousness of love - the first fluttering of its siken wings."
"Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom."
"To be left alone, and face to face with my own crime, had been just retribution."
"Trust no future, however pleasant! Let the dead past bury its dead! Act - act in the living Present! Heart within and God overhead."
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."
"When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music."
"Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit."
"Whoever benefits his enemy with straightforward intention that man's enemies will soon fold their hands in devotion."
"Would you learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers, comprehend its mystery!"
"Write on your doors the saying wise and old. "Be bold!" and everywhere - "Be bold; Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less sustaineth him and the steadiness of his mind beareth him out."
"Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!"
"You know I say just what I think, and nothing more and less. I cannot say one thing and mean another."
"Youth comes but once in a lifetime."
"A gentleman with a pug nose is a contradiction in terms."
"A strong argument for the religion of Christ is this - that offences against Charity are about the only ones which men on their death-beds can be made - not to understand - but to feel - as crime."
"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
"Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears."
"I have great faith in fools; self-confidence my friends call it."
"I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."
"I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager."
"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."
"In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me."
"In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed."
"It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream."
"Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so."
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary."
"Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words."
"That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward."
"That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful."
"The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind."
"The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led."
"The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be."
"There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few."
"There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man."
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
"To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair."
"To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness."
"We loved with a love that was more than love."
"Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'"
"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."
"A day spent in a round of strenuous idleness."
"A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor."
"A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual all-in-all!"
"But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night, shall lead thee to thy grave."
"Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher."
"Faith is a passionate intuition."
"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
"Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
"For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good."
"For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity."
"Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely-calculated less or more."
"Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness."
"Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent."
"Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue."
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy."
"How does the Meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold."
"Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams."
"I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee."
"In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing."
"In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find."
"In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind."
"Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future."
"Lost in a gloom of uninspired research."
"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her."
"Neither evil tongues, rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life, shall e'er prevail against us."
"No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees."
"Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams - can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man."
"One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can."
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come."
"Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them."
"Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore; Plain living and high thinking are no more."
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love."
"She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years."
"Small service is true service, while it lasts."
"That best portion of a man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love."
"That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened."
"That though the radiance which was once so bright be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower. We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind."
"The Child is the father of the Man."
"The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly."
"The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this."
"The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind."
"The ocean is a mighty harmonist."
"The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benedictions."
"The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours."
"This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air."
"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
"To begin, begin."
"To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
"Tossing their heads in sprightly dance."
"What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out."
"When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign in solitude."
"Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar."
"Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar."
"With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."
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