Robert Browning Quotes
Robert Browning shares wistful, lyrical thoughts on life, nature and divinity.
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Autumn wins you best by this its mute Appeal to sympathy for its decay.
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God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.
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And gain is gain, however small.
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Deeds let escape are never to be done.
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The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearl'd; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His heaven- All's right with the world!
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Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And even spoiled the women's chats By drowning their speaking With shrieking and squeaking In fifty different sharps and flats.
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Kiss me as if you made believe You were not sure, this eve, How my face, your flower, had pursed It's petals up.
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Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
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Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
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We loved, sir - used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was - But then, how it was sweet!
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Who hears music feels his solitude Peopled at once.
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Womanliness means only motherhood; All love begins and ends there.
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My sun sets to rise again.
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Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!
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What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
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A minute's success pays the failure of years.
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All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee: All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem: In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea: Breath and bloom, shade and shine, - wonder, wealth, and - how far above them -
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'Summum Bonum' (1889)
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The moment eternal - just that and no more - When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!
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One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.
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What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold:
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Oh, to be in England Now that April's there.
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That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!
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How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses Forever in joy!
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'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
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I do what many dream of, all their lives, --Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, And fail in doing. I could count twenty such On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, Who strive--you don't know how the others strive To paint a little thing like that you smeared Carelessly passing with your robes afloat-- Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, (I know his name, no matter)--so much less! Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. There burns a truer light of God in them, In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain, Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.
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Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
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Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
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If you get simple beauty and naught else, You get about the best thing God invents.
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You should not take a fellow eight years old And make him swear to never kiss the girls.
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I count life just a stuff To try the soul's strength on.
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What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
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Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
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Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist.
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Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith, 'A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!'
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Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all! Not for such hopes and fears Annulling youth's brief years, Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! Rather I prize the doubt Low kinds exist without, Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. Poor vaunt of life indeed, Were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; Such feasting ended, then As sure an end to men.
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Let us cry, 'All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!'
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Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Now, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, I that: whom shall my soul believe?
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All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
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Fool! All that is, at all, Lasts ever, past recall; Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: What entered into thee, That was, is, and shall be: Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.
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Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup.
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Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel? But I need, now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men.
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So, take, and use thy work: Amend what flaws may lurk, What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim! My times be in thy hand! Perfect the cup as planned! Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!
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O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird And all a wonder and a wild desire.
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Go practise if you please With men and women: leave a child alone For Christ's particular love's sake!
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Faultless to a fault.
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Of what I call God, And fools call Nature.
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White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life's business being just the terrible choice.
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Inscribe all human effort with one word, Artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!
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Love is energy of life.
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He concentrated on the special souls of men; seeking God in a series of personal interviews.
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He is called an optimist; but the word suggests a calculated contentment which was not in the least one of his vices. What he really was was a romantic. He offered the cosmos as an adventure rather than a scheme. He did not explain evil, far less explain it away: he enjoyed defying it. He was a troubadour even in theology and metaphysics: like the Jongleurs de Dieu of St. Francis. He may be said to have serenaded heaven with a guitar, and even, so to speak, tried to climb there with a rope ladder.
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Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
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Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
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When the liquor's out, why clink the cannikin?
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I would have rummaged, ransacked at the word; Those old odd corners of an empty heart; For remnants of dim love the long disused, And dusty crumbling of romance!
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All service ranks the same with God,- With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.
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But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?
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Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware.
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The ultimate, angels' law, Indulging every instinct of the soul There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!
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What a thing friendship is - World without end.
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Silence 'tis awe decrees.
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But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty.
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Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.
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I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
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Strike when thou wilt, the hour of rest, but let my last days be my best.
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Death was past, life not come: so he waited.
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You never know what life means till you die; even throughout life, tis death that makes life live.
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But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.
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In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe.
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Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven.
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And inasmuch as feeling, the East's gift, Is quick and transient,- comes, and lo! is gone, While Northern thought is slow and durable.
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Dear, dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?
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Talent should minister to genius.