Quotes to inspire and reflect

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

Today unbind the captive, So only are ye unbound; Lift up a people from the dust, Trump of their rescue, sound!

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.

“Pass in, pass in,” the angels say, “In to the upper doors, Nor count compartments of the floors, But mount to paradise By the stairway of surprise.”

Heartily know, When half-gods go, The gods arrive.

Love not the flower they pluck, and know it not, And all their botany is Latin names.

Give all to love; Obey thy heart; Friends, kindred, days, Estate, good fame, Plans, credit and the Muse, Nothing refuse.

There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled— Law for man, and law for thing.

Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.

Things are of the snake.

In May, when sea winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow.

In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Line in nature is not found; Unit and universe are round; In vain produced, all rays return; Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

The hand that rounded Peter’s dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity; Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew— The conscious stone to beauty grew.

I like a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowlèd churchman be.

I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.

Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home; Thou art not my friend and I’m not thine.

Nor knowest thou what argument Thy life to thy neighbor’s creed has lent. All are needed by each one; Nothing is fair or good alone.

It was a dark and stormy night. 1

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.

Rank is a great beautifier.

To rise at six, to dine at ten, To sup at six, to sleep at ten, Makes a man live for ten times ten.

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; Lead thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.

It is thy very energy of thought Which keeps thee from thy God.

Time hath a taming hand.

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.

Glimmering stars of the Great Bear, I never thought I’d be back to see you Shining down on my father’s garden, Nor talk to you ever again from the windows Of this house where I spent my childhood And saw the last of my happiness vanish.

What were we? What was that bitter instant We called life?

So we keep asking, over and over, Until a handful of earth Stops our mouths— But is that an answer?

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

I cannot tell why this imagined Despair has fallen upon me; The ghost of an ancient legend That will not let me be.

Child, you are like a flower, So sweet and pure and fair. I look at you, and sadness Touches me with a prayer.

I will not mourn, although my heart is torn, Oh, love forever lost! I will not mourn.

On wings of song, my dearest, I will carry you off.

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores.

When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.

I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!”

It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns.

She looked at me as she did love, And made sweet moan.

I met a lady in the meads Full beautiful, a faery’s child; Her hair was long, her foot was light, And her eyes were wild.

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is— I hold it towards you.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing!

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal.