14 Sidney Lanier Quotes

Sidney Lanier quotes

1. O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead! The time needs heart - 'tis tired of head.

2. And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word.

1. Look out, Death: I am coming.-Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.-What memories of old battles.-Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.

2. I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies, In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies.

3. Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.

4. But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, O perfect life in perfect labor writ, O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest, -- What IF or YET, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, What least defect or shadow of defect, What rumor, tattled by an enemy, Of inference loose, what lack of grace Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's -- Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ?

5. If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.

6. Well: Love and Pain Be kinfolks twain; Yet would, Oh would I could Love again.

7. If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants.

8. But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?

9. The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West.

10. Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side.

11. As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest From the root to the top of the tree, Then flies to another tree, So have I bored into life to find what lay therein, And now it is time to die, And I will fly to another tree.

12. Into the woods, my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent, Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, When into the woods He came.