William Morris Quotes

We are only the trustees for those who come after us.

"Love, who changest all, change me nevermore! "Love, who changest all, change my sorrow sore!

"Love gives every gift whereby we long to live: "Love takes every gift, and nothing back doth give.

Il rimedio è nelle mani degli artigiani, che su queste materie non sono ignoranti come la gente comune, e che non tendono a essere avari e a starsene isolati come i proletari delle manifatture o i mediatori; è a loro che competono l'onore e l'onere di educare il pubblico, ed essi recano in sé i semi dell'ordine e dell'organizzazione che renderanno più facile il loro compito.

Masters, I have to tell a tale of woe, A tale of folly and of wasted life, Hope against hope, the bitter dregs of strife, Ending, where all things end, in death at last.

Art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour.

No pillager or wrecker had been there; It seemed that time had passed on otherwhere, Nor laid a finger on this hidden place Rich with the wealth of some forgotten race.

Yea, and thy deeds shall thou know, and great shall thy gladness be;
As a picture all of gold thy life-days shalt thou see,
And know that thou too wert a God to abide through the hurry and haste;
A God in the golden hall, a God on the rain-swept waste,
A God in the battle triumphant, a God on the heap of the slain:
And thine hope shall arise and blossom, and thy love shall be quickened again:
And then shalt thou see before thee the face of all earthly ill;
Thou shalt drink of the cup of awakening that thine hand hath holpen to fill;
By the side of the sons of Odin shalt thou fashion a tale to be told
In the hall of the happy Baldur: nor there shall the tale grow old
Of the days before the changing, e'en those that over us pass.
So harden thine heart, O brother, and set thy brow as the brass!

To happy folk All heaviest words no more of meaning bear Than far-off bells saddening the Summer air.

How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?

Fear and Hope — those are the names of the two great passions which rule the race of man, and with which revolutionists have to deal; to give hope to the many oppressed and fear to the few oppressors, that is our business; if we do the first and give hope to the many, the few must be frightened by their hope; otherwise we do not want to frighten them; it is not revenge we want for poor people, but happiness; indeed, what revenge can be taken for all the thousands of years of the sufferings of the poor?

Love is enough: draw near and behold me Ye who pass by the way to your rest and your laughter, And are full of the hope of the dawn coming after; For the strong of the world have bought me and sold me And my house is all wasted from threshold to rafter. — Pass by me, and hearken, and think of me not!

The heavy trouble, the bewildering care That weighs us down who live and earn our bread, These idle verses have no power to bear; So let em sing of names rememberèd, Because they, living not, can ne'er be dead, Or long time take their memory quite away From us poor singers of an empty day.

Ah! wilt thou leave me then without one kiss, To slay the very seeds of fear and doubt, That glad to-morrow may bring certain bliss? Hast thou forgotten how love lives by this, The memory of some hopeful close embrace, Low whispered words within some lonely place?

As a matter of fact, the history of the terrible period of transition from commercial slavery to freedom may thus be summarised. When the hope of realising a communal condition of life for all men arose, quite late in the nineteenth century, the power of the middle classes, the then tyrants of society, was so enormous and crushing, that to almost all men, even those who had, you may say despite themselves, despite their reason and judgement, conceived such hopes, it seemed a dream. So much was this the case that some of those more enlightened men who were then called Socialists, although they well knew, and even stated in public, that the only reasonable condition of Society was that of pure Communism (such as you now see around you), yet shrunk from what seemed to them the barren task of preaching the realisation of a happy dream. Looking back now, we can see that the great motive-power of the change was a longing for freedom and equality, akin if you please to the unreasonable passion of the lover; a sickness of heart that rejected with loathing the aimless solitary life of the well-educated man of that time: phrases, my dear friend, which have lost their meaning to us of the present day; so far removed we are from the dreadful facts which they represent.