Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Emily Dickinson.
Last updated on October 10, 2024.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry.
Luck is not chance, it's toil; fortune's expensive smile is earned.
Fortune befriends the bold.
Saying nothing... sometimes says the most.
Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.
Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.
I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
Nature is our eldest mother; she will do no harm.
The brain is wider than the sky.
The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.
Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes. The Nerves sit ceremonious, like tombs.
God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him! The charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded, I fear, by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.
Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.
Morning without you is a dwindled dawn.
Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.
How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!
Beauty is not caused. It is.
My friends are my estate.
A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.
Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.
Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.
I dwell in possibility.
Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!
That it will never come again is what makes life sweet.
I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.
Where thou art, that is home.
Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
We were never intimate mother and children while she was our mother - but... when she became our child, the affection came.
Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door.
Forever is composed of nows.
Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one's hopes in a pile of broken crockery.
I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul - and sings the tunes without the words - and never stops at all.
They might not need me; but they might. I'll let my head be just in sight; a smile as small as mine might be precisely their necessity.
If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better.
Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
I'm nobody, who are you?
To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.
I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.
A wounded deer leaps the highest.
Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
I am growing handsome very fast indeed! I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year. I don't doubt that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age. Then how I shall delight to make them await my bidding, and with what delight shall I witness their suspense while I make my final decision.
To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.