Robert Browning Quotes

Be there, for once and all, Severed great minds from small, Announced to each his station in the Past! Was I, the world arraigned, Were they, my soul disdained, Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last! Now, who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten, who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, I that: whom shall my soul believe?

Rafael made a century of sonnets.

Progress is
The law of life: man is not Man as yet.

One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake.

Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it, -so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present, condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense.

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

God’s in His heaven — All’s right with the world!

On a day like today I am stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.

Deeds let escape are never to be done.

Let me weep
My youth and its brave hopes, all dead and gone,
In tears which burn.

And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.

And inasmuch as feeling, the East's gift,
Is quick and transient,—comes, and lo! is gone,
While Northern thought is slow and durable.

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are, Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture!

How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.