Robert Browning
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.Collection: Alone
So, fall asleep love, loved by me... for I know love, I am loved by thee.Collection: Love
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.Collection: God
Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?Collection: Men
If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.Collection: Beauty
Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.Collection: Faith
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.Collection: Mothers
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?Collection: Inspirational
The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o'er the land, Breaks there, and buries its tumultuous strength.Collection: Strength
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.Collection: Age
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Business
A minute's success pays the failure of years.Collection: Success
I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.Collection: Beauty
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.Collection: Love
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.Collection: Religion
Love is energy of life.Collection: Love
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.Collection: Sympathy
God is the perfect poet.Collection: God
I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on.Collection: Strength
Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.Collection: Best
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.Collection: Age
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.Collection: Music
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!Collection: Great
Oh, to be in England now that April's there.
My sun sets to rise again.
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.
Every one soon or late comes round by Rome.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.
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!
Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts.
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.
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.
Only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.
No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something.
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
Better have failed in the high aim, as I, Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed As, God be thanked! I do not.
Faultless to a fault.
Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
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!
God's justice, tardy though it prove perchance, Rests never on the track until it reach Delinquency.