109 quotes
For poets (bear the word)
Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Free men freely work:
Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
O the little birds sang east, and the little birds sang west.
Poems (1844)
Walls must get the weather stain
Before they grow the ivy.
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
The devil’s most devilish when respectable.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
And kings crept out again to feel the sun.
Poems (1844)
Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the rest!
But since he had
The genius to be loved, why let him have
The justice to be honoured in his grave.
Poems (1844)
The beautiful seems right
By force of Beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Life treads on life, and heart on heart;
We press too close in church and mart
To keep a dream or grave apart.
But so fair,
She takes the breath of men away
Who gaze upon her unaware.
Last Poems (1862)
Most illogical
Irrational nature of our womanhood,
That blushes one way, feels another way,
And prays, perhaps, another!
Aurora Leigh (1856)
Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which, if cut deep down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.
Poems (1844)
For frequent tears have run
The colours from my life.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
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.
I know—is all the mourner saith,
Knowledge by suffering entereth;
And Life is perfected by Death.
Near all the birds,
Will sing at dawn,—and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.
Aurora Leigh (1857)
Never was lady on earth more true as woman and wife,
Larger in judgment and instinct, prouder in manners and life.