Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

“There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell.”

“And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.”

“Silence is the best response to a fool.”

“There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!”

“I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me.”

“Love that endures, from life that disappears!”

“Quick-loving hearts ... may quickly loathe.”

“Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished.”

“Most illogical Irrational nature of our womanhood, That blushes one way, feels another way, And prays, perhaps another!”

“Books succeed; and lives fail.”

“I worked with patience which means almost power.”

“Much of the possibility of being cheerful comes from the faculty of throwing oneself beyond oneself.”

“He's just, your cousin, ay, abhorrently, He'd wash his hands in blood, to keep them clean.”

“The beautiful seems right by force of beauty and the feeble wrong because of weakness.”

“Death forerunneth Love to win "Sweetest eyes were ever seen."”

“World's use is cold, world's love is vain, world's cruelty is bitter bane; but is not the fruit of pain.”

“Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!”

“All actual heroes are essential men, And all men possible heroes.”

“For 'Tis not in mere death that men die most.”

“A woman is always younger than a man at equal years.”

“We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits--so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, Impassioned for its beauty, and salt of truth-- 'Tis then we get the right good from a book.”

“My love for him was so exquisitely pure that if we all were capable of giving and receiving such a beautiful gift the world would be a far more brilliant place; I think we'd all be poets.”

“What is genius but the power of expressing a new individuality?”

“Wall must get the weather stain Before they grow the ivy.”

“Knowledge by suffering entereth,And life is perfected by death.”