Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Quotes

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.

A thought often makes us hotter than a fire.

All things come round to him who will but wait.

Evil is only good perverted.

It is a beautiful trait in the lover's character, that they think no evil of the object loved.

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.

He that respects himself is safe from others. He wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.

That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

The human voice is the organ of the soul.

The mind of the scholar, if he would leave it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds.

The nearer the dawn the darker the night.

There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings.

Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.

Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.

Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art.

If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose.

Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Resolve and thou art free.

Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.

The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.

It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.

Into each life some rain must fall.

Look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again. Wisely improve the present, it is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy future without fear and with a manly heart.

There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.

There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.

Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.

The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.

Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close; Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

They who go Feel not the pain of parting; it is they Who stay behind that suffer.

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.

In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.

Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined; Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.