Robert Browning Quotes
Poet & Playwright
Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
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.
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
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.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.
Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.
If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.
Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts.
So, fall asleep love, loved by me... for I know love, I am loved by thee.
A minute's success pays the failure of years.
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!
My sun sets to rise again.
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
Love is energy of life.
How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
God is the perfect poet.
Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
Only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.
Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.
What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o'er the land, Breaks there, and buries its tumultuous strength.
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.
No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something.
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.
But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.
Oh, to be in England now that April's there.
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.
The moment eternal - just that and no more - When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!
It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls.
Faultless to a fault.
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.
I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on.
Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?
Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?
Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven.
God's justice, tardy though it prove perchance, Rests never on the track until it reach Delinquency.
Better have failed in the high aim, as I, Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed As, God be thanked! I do not.