Robert Browning Quotes

God is the perfect poet.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

All June I bound the rose in sheaves, Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves.

Every one soon or late comes round by Rome.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

God’s justice, tardy though it prove perchance, Rests never on the track until it reach Delinquency.

My sun sets to rise again.

I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.

Love, hope, fear, faith – these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

Faultless to a fault.

Only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.

Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven.

Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?

But how carve way i’ the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?

I count life just a stuff to try the soul’s strength on.

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.

Better have failed in the high aim, as I, Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed As, God be thanked! I do not.

Ambition is not what man does… but what man would do.

A minute‘s success pays the failure of years.

Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life’s business being just the terrible choice.

The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o’er the land, Breaks there, and buries its tumultuous strength.

It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.

Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

Oh, to be in England now that April‘s there.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.