237 quotes
With aching hands and bleeding feet
We dig and heap, lay stone on stone;
We bear the burden and the heat
Of the long day and wish’t were done.
Not till the hours of light return
All we have built do we discern.
Ah! two desires toss about
The poet's feverish blood;
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.
And amongst us one,
Who most has suffer’d, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne.
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
[W]ithout order there can be no society, and without society there can be no human perfection.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Rapt, twirling in thy hand a wither'd spray,
And waiting for the spark from heaven to fall.
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
When the dew glistens on the pearlèd ears,
A shiver runs through the deep corn for joy.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims.
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression.
On Translating Homer (1861)
This heart, I know,
To be long lov’d was never fram’d;
For something in its depths doth glow
Too strange, too restless, too untam’d.
Ere the parting hour go by,
Quick, thy tablets, Memory!
I am past thirty, and three parts iced over.
For rigorous teachers seized my youth,
And purged its faith, and trimm’d its fire,
Show’d me the high white star of Truth,
There bade me gaze, and there aspire.
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)
Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.
Mixed Essays (1879)
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
Civilization in the United States (1888)
If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.
Civilization in the United States (1888)
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?
Girl! nimble with thy feet, not with thy hands!
Curl'd minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words!
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes:
Ah! would that I did too.