209 quotes
A mother is a mother still;
The holiest thing alive.
The Friend (1809)
Humour is consistent with pathos, whilst wit is not.
Letter to a friend (1821)
The doing evil to avoid an evil
Cannot be good.
Wallenstein (1800)
Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines.
Hymn before Sunrise, in the Vale of Chamouni (1802)
And in Life's noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart's Self-solace and soliloquy.
You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.
The Presence of Love (1807)
Prose—words in their best order;—poetry—the best words in their best order.
Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets (1811)
An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and star.
The Friend (1809)
O lady! we receive but what we give
And in our life alone does Nature live.
Dejection: An Ode (1802)
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Poor little foal of an oppressèd race!
I love the languid patience of thy face.
What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.
The Friend (1809)
Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams!
Often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.
Wallenstein (1800)
Clothing the palpable and the familiar
With golden exhalations of the dawn.
Wallenstein (1800)
Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,
Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.
The saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all.
Manly energy … is the proper rendering [for αρετην], and not virtue, at least in the present and ordinary acceptation of the word.
Aids to Reflection (1825)