Robert Browning's Quotes

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?

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.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.

So, fall asleep love, loved by me... for I know love, I am loved by thee.

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.

My sun sets to rise again.

Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.

God is the perfect poet.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?

Love is energy of life.

But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.

The moment eternal - just that and no more - When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

A minute's success pays the failure of years.

All June I bound the rose in sheaves, Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves.

I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!

Every one soon or late comes round by Rome.

Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?