237 quotes
Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell
Thyrsis (1866)
The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay
Essays in Criticism (1865)
There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.
The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)
We do not what we ought,
What we ought not, we do,
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through;
But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
Oh, hide me in your gloom profound,
Ye solemn seats of holy pain!
Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round,
Till I possess my soul again;
Till free my thoughts before me roll,
Not chafed by hourly false control!
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)
So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear.
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of thy day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.
Rugby Chapel (1867)
Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died.
Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.
Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,
Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside.
Thyrsis (1866)
Children dear, was it yesterday
(Call yet once) that she went away?
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Thou hast no right to bliss.
Empedocles on Etna (1852)
The East bow'd low before the blast,
In patient, deep disdain.
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it.
Culture and Anarchy (1869)
Let the long contention cease!
Geese are swans, and swans are geese.
Let them have it how they will!
Thou art tired; best be still.
New Poems (1867)
His spear,
Whose fiery point now in his mail’d right-hand
Blaz’d bright and baleful, like that autumn Star,
The baleful sign of fevers.
Saw life steadily and saw it whole.
and left
His bed, and the warm rugs whereon he lay,
And o’er his chilly limbs his woollen coat
He pass’d.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
An unlopp’d trunk it was, and huge,
Still rough; like those which men in treeless plains
... fish from the flooded rivers.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
Below the surface stream, shallow and light,
Of what we say and feel — below the stream,
As light, of what we think we feel, there flows
With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep,
The central stream of what we feel indeed.
What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also.
Preface to Poems (1853)
[Oxford] Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties.