Top 262 Quotes & Sayings by Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Page 5

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.

Many a crown Covers bald foreheads.

Earth may embitter, not remove, The love divinely given; And e'en that mortal grief shall prove The immortality of love, And lead us nearer heaven.

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.

I worked with patience which means almost power.

Beloved, let us live so well our work shall still be better for our love, and still our love be sweeter for our work.

The plague of gold strikes far and near.

God keeps a niche In Heaven, to hold our idols; and albeit He brake them to our faces, and denied That our close kisses should impair their white,-- I know we shall behold them raised, complete, The dust swept from their beauty, glorified, New Memnons singing in the great God-light.

Books succeed; and lives fail.

She lived, we'll say, A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all (But that she had not lived enough to know)

Mountain gorses, do ye teach us . . . . That the wisest word man reaches Is the humblest he can speak?

But I love you, sir: And when a woman says she loves a man, The man must hear her, though he love her not.

The flower-girl's prayer to buy roses and pinks, held out in the smoke, like stars by day.

Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!

And friends, dear friends,--when it shall be That this low breath is gone from me, And gone my bier ye come to weep, Let One, most loving of you all, Say, "Not a tear must o'er her fall; He giveth His beloved sleep.

A great acacia, with its slender trunk And overpoise of multitudinous leaves. (In which a hundred fields might spill their dew And intense verdure, yet find room enough) Stood reconciling all the place with green.

Pray, pray, thou who also weepest,-- And the drops will slacken so; Weep, weep--and the watch thou keepest, With a quicker count will go. Think,--the shadow on the dial For the nature most undone, Marks the passing of the trial, Proves the presence of the sun.

I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.

Free men freely work: Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.

Deep violets, you liken to The kindest eyes that look on you, Without a thought disloyal.

Utterance is the evidence of foregone study.

We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!