Quotes to inspire and reflect

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring’d with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

 

One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves.

 

Wearing all that weight Of learning lightly like a flower.

 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease, Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace.

 

Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.

 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky!

 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

 

Fresh from brawling courts And dusty purlieus of the law.

 

So many worlds, so much to do, So little done, such things to be.

 

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

 

O Sorrow, wilt Thou live with me No casual mistress, but a wife.

 

The great world’s altar-stairs, That slope through darkness up to God.

 

So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life.

 

Oh yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill.

 

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

 

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side?

 

Hold thou the good; define it well; For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

 

Be near me when my light is low.

 

And Time, a maniac scattering dust, And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

 

How fares it with the happy dead?

 

I do but sing because I must, And pipe but as the linnets sing.

 

And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.

 

But, for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before.

 

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

 

Our little systems have their day.

 

Believing where we cannot prove.

 

Sweet is every sound, Sweeter thy voice, but every sound is sweet; Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

 

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies open unto me.

 

Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey; All else confusion.

 

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

 

Man is the hunter; woman is his game.

 

O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, Fly to her, and fall upon her gilded eaves, And tell her, tell her, what I tell to thee.

 

Dear as remember’d kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

 

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing.

 

The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

 

Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea, Low, low, breathe and blow, Wind of the western sea! Over the rolling waters go, Come from the dying moon, and blow, Blow him again to me; While my little one, while my pretty one, sleeps.

 

And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long That on the stretched forefinger of all Time Sparkle forever.

 

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me.

 

Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O, well for the fisherman’s boy, That he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O, for the touch of a vanish’d hand, And the sound of a voice that is still!

 

My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure.

 

Cophetua sware a royal oath; “This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

 

Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.

 

Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.

 

I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.

 

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.

 

Woman is the lesser man, and all thy passions, match’d with mine, Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine.