Algernon Charles Swinburne Quotes

If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pasture or gray grief;
If love were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf.

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.

Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain.

His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep.

His speech is a burning fire.

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell, Remembrance fallen from heaven, And Madness risen from hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.

God by God flits past in thunder, till His glories turn to shades; God to God bears wondering witness how His gospel flames and fades. More was each of these, yet they were, than man their servant seemed: Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed.

A crown and justice? Night and day Shall first be yoked together.

Life is the lust of a lamp for the light that is dark till the dawn of the day that we die.

I can truly say with Shelley I have been fortunate in friendships: that I have been no less fortunate in my enemies than in my friends.

Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.

Miłość, sen i śmierć nadchodzą pomału
Schwyć mnie za włosy i mocno pocałuj.

WE live in an age when not to be scientific is to be nothing; the man untrained in science, though he should speak with the tongues of men and of angels, though he should know all that man may know of the history of men and their works in time past, though he should have nourished on the study of their noblest examples in art and literature whatever he may have of natural intelligence, is but a pitiable and worthless pretender in the sight of professors to whom natural science is not a mean but an end; not an instrument of priceless worth for the mental workman, but a result in itself satisfying and final, a substitute in place of an auxiliary, a sovereign in lieu of an ally, a goal instead of a chariot.