Elizabeth Barrett Browning Quotes

She has seen the mystery hid
Under Egypt's pyramid:
By those eyelids pale and close
Now she knows what Rhamses knows.

And if God choose
I shall but love thee better after death.

The wisest word man reaches is the humblest he can speak.

His answer was - not the common gallantries which come so easily to the lips of me - but simply that he loved me - he met argument with fact. He told me - that with himself also, the early freshness of youth had gone by, & that throughout it he had not been able to love any woman - that he loved now for the first time & the last.

The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of they soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me...

I only thought
Of lying quiet there where I was thrown
Like sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer her
To prick me to a pattern with her pin,
Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,
And dry out from my drowned anatomy
The last sea-salt left in me.

I tell you hopeless grief is passionless,
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death — Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet;
If it could weep, it could arise and go.

It is the nature of the human mind to convey its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language.

Because God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame.

Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man.

Meanwhile, we have at last sent our letter (Mazzini’s) to George Sand, accompanied with a little note signed by both of us, though written by me, as seemed right, being the woman. We half despaired in doing this, for it is most difficult, it appears, to get at her, she having taken vows against seeing strangers in consequence of various annoyances and persecutions in and out of print, which it’s the mere instinct of a woman to avoid. I can understand it perfectly. Also, she is in Paris for only a few days, and under a new name, to escape from the plague of her notoriety.

الكتَابُ هو المعلم الذي يعلم بلا عصا ولا غضب , إن قصدته لا يختبئ منك وإن أخطأت لا يوبخك , وإذا أظهرت جهلك لا يسخر منك

I never gave a lock of hair away
To a man, Dearest, except this to thee,
Which now upon my fingers thoughtfully
I ring out to the full brown length and say
“Take it.” My day of youth went yesterday;
My hair no longer bounds to my foot’s glee,
Nor plant I it from rose- or myrtle-tree,
As girls do, any more: it only may
Now shade on two pale cheeks the mark of tears,
Taught drooping from the head that hangs aside
Through sorrow’s trick. I thought the funeral-shears
Would take this first, but Love is justified, — Take it thou, — finding pure, from all those years,
The kiss my mother left here when she died.

Every wish
Is like a prayer—with God.

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.