Alfred Tennyson Quotes

Man is the hunter; woman is his game. The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, we hunt them for the beauty of their skins; they love us for it, and we ride them down.

Ah well, well, well, I may be beguiled
By some coquettish deceit.
Yet, if she were not a cheat,
If Maud were all that she seem'd,
And her smile were all that I dream'd,
Then the world were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.

I had liefer twenty years/Skip to the broken music of my brains/Than any broken music thou canst make.

And then I look’d up toward a mountain-tract,
That girt the region with high cliff and lawn:
I saw that every morning, far withdrawn
Beyond the darkness and the cataract,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn,
Unheeded...

And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.

And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?

Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star
We saw not when we moved therein?

God gives us Love, something to love, God lends us.

I cannot see the features right,
When on the gloom I strive to paint
The face I know; the hues are faint
And mix with hollow masks of night.

Verse LXIX

More than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the nameless, as a cloud
Melts into heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange, not mine — and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self
The gain of such large life as matched with ours
Were sun to spark — unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world

O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each,
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.

Be thou as the immortal are, Who dwell beneath their God’s own wing A spirit of light, a living star, A holy and a searchless thing: But oh! forget not those who mourn, Because thou canst no more return.

All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past

She is for always roaming with a hungry heart.

I am part of all that I have met.

Why are we weigh’d upon with heaviness, And utterly consumed with sharp distress, While all things else have rest from weariness? All things have rest: why should we toil alone, We only toil, who are the first of things, And make perpetual moan, Still from one sorrow to another thrown: Nor ever fold our wings, And cease from wanderings, Nor steep our brows in slumber’s holy balm; Nor harken what the inner spirit sings, “There is no joy but calm!” Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?