Robert Browning Quotes

Be sure that God
Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart.

And if at whiles the bubble, blown too thin,
Seem nigh on bursting, — if you nearly see
The real world through the false, — what do you see?
Is the old so ruined? You find you ’re in a flock
O’ the youthful, earnest, passionate — genius, beauty,
Rank and wealth also, if you care for these:
And all depose their natural rights, hail you,
(That ’s me, sir) as their mate and yoke-fellow,
Participate in Sludgehood

This could but have happened once,— And we missed it, lost it forever.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened the next tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss . . .

How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark Autumn evenings come,
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
In life’s November too!

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O’er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows,
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!

God is the perfect poet, Who in his person acts his own creations.

Have they fancies — slow, perchance,
Not at their beck, which indistinctly glance
Until by song each floating part be linked
To each, and all grow palpable, distinct?
He pondered this.

That we devote ourselves to God, is seen
In living just as though no God there were.

Never the time and the place And the loved one all together!

Best be yourself, imperial, plain, and true.

There is but one way to brow-beat this world,
Dumb-founder doubt, and repay scorn in kind, — To go on trusting, namely, till faith move Mountains.

Look not thou down but up! To uses of a cup.

But to have seen thee, and to die so soon!

As is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search:
You will find what you desire.

It is the glory and good of Art
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth - to mouths like mine, at least.