Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (née Moulton-Barrett; ; 6 March 1806 – 29 June 1861) was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime.
Born in County Durham, the eldest of 11 children, Elizabeth Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven. Her mother's collection of her poems forms one of the largest extant collections of juvenilia by any English writer. At 15 she became ill, suffering intense head and spinal pain for the rest of her life. Later in life she also developed lung problems, possibly tuberculosis. She took laudanum for the pain from an early age, which is likely to have contributed to her frail health.
In the 1840s Elizabeth was introduced to literary society through her cousin, John Kenyon. Her first adult collection of poems was published in 1838 and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation and prose. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and her work helped influence reform in the child labour legislation. Her prolific output made her a rival to Tennyson as a candidate for poet laureate on the death of Wordsworth.
Elizabeth's volume Poems (1844) brought her great success, attracting the admiration of the writer Robert Browning. Their correspondence, courtship and marriage were carried out in secret, for fear of her father's disapproval. Following the wedding she was indeed disinherited by her father. In 1846, the couple moved to Italy, where she would live for the rest of her life. They had a son, known as "Pen" (Robert Wiedeman Barrett Browning) (1849–1912). Pen devoted himself to painting until his eyesight began to fail later in life; he also built up a large collection of manuscripts and memorabilia of his parents, however, since he died intestate, it was sold by public auction to various bidders, and scattered upon his death. The Armstrong Browning Library has tried to recover some of his collection, and now houses the world's largest collection of Browning memorabilia. Elizabeth died in Florence in 1861. A collection of her last poems was published by her husband shortly after her death.
Elizabeth's work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. She is remembered for such poems as "How Do I Love Thee?" (Sonnet 43, 1845) and Aurora Leigh (1856).
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face, A gauntlet with a gift in 't.
You were made perfectly to be loved and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.
Amazing how we can light tomorrow with today.
Hurt a fly! He would not for the world: he's pitiful to flies even. Sing, says he, and tease me still, if that's your way, poor insect.
With my lost saints,-- I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!-- and if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
Purple lilies Dante blew To a larger bubble with his prophet breath.
Beloved, let us live so well our work shall still be better for our love, and still our love be sweeter for our work.
It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth--
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
I have done most of my talking by post of late years -- as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.
Men could not part us with their worldly jars,
Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;
Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars, --
And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,
We should but vow the faster for the stars.
And I must bear
What is ordained with patience, being aware
Necessity doth front the universe
With an invincible gesture.
When the dust of death has choked a great man's voice, the common words he said turn oracles, the common thoughts he yoked like horses draw like griffins.
Very whitely still The lilies of our lives may reassure Their blossoms from their roots, accessible Alone to heavenly dews that drop not fewer; Growing straight out of man's reach, on the hill. God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
Our Euripides the human,
With his droppings of warm tears,
and his touchings of things common
Till they rose to meet the spheres.
It is difficult to get rid of people when you once have given them too much pleasure.
Life, struck sharp on death, Makes awful lightning.
My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument.
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
It is the nature of the human mind to convey its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language.
Most illogical Irrational nature of our womanhood, That blushes one way, feels another way, And prays, perhaps another!
Nosegays! leave them for the waking,
Throw them earthward where they grew
Dim are such, beside the breaking
Amaranths he looks unto.
Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.
The soul's Rialto hath its merchandise, I barter for curl upon that mart.
Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll-
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me-toll
The silver iterance!-only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence, with thy soul.
When God helps all the workers for His world,
The singers shall have help of Him, not last.
Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.
And is it not the chief good of money, the being free from the need of thinking of it?
God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song.
Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the rest!
Measure not the work until the day's out and the labor done.
There's nothing great Nor small, has said a poet of our day, Whose voice will ring beyond the curfew of eve And not be thrown out by the matin's bell.
He who breathes deepest lives most.
Souls are dangerous things to carry straight through all the spilt saltpetre of this world.
There Shakespeare, on whose forehead climb The crowns o' the world; oh, eyes sublime With tears and laughter for all time!
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love. Yet love me -- wilt thou? Open thine heart wide, And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.
A good neighbor sometimes cuts your morning up to mince-meat of the very smallest talk, then helps to sugar her bohea at night with your reputation.
It was not the apple on the tree but the pair on the ground that caused the trouble in the garden of Eden.
May the good God pardon all good men.
Whoso loves, believes in the impossible.
The music soars within the little lark, And the lark soars.
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental.
Longer Version:
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
And Marlowe, Webster, Fletcher, Ben, Whose fire-hearts sowed our furrows when The world was worthy of such men.
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me.
Large, musing eyes, neither joyous nor sorry.
The denial of contemporary genius is the rule rather than the exception. No one counts the eagles in the nest, till there is a rush of wings; and lo! they are flown.
You may write twenty lines one day -- or even three like Euripides in three days -- and a hundred lines in one more day -- and yet on the hundred, may have been expended as much good work, as on the twenty and the three.
His ears were often the first thing to catch my tears.
Think, in mounting higher, the angels would press on us, and aspire to drop some golden orb of perfect song into our deep, dear silence.
We overstate the ills of life, and take Imagination... down our earth to rake.
A great man leaves clean work behind him, and requires no sweeper up of the chips.
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air beat upward to god's throne in loud access of shrieking and reproach.
My future will not copy my fair past, I wrote that once. And, thinking at my side my ministering life-angel justified the word by his appealing look upcast to the white throne of God.
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.
As the moths around a taper,
As the bees around a rose,
As the gnats around a vapour,
So the spirits group and close
Round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose.
The tyrant should take heed to what he doth,
Since every victim-carrion turns to use,
And drives a chariot, like a god made wroth,
Against each piled injustice.
What monster have we here? A great Deed at this hour of day? A great just deed -- and not for pay? Absurd -- or insincere?
Every age, Through being beheld too close, is ill-discerned By those who have not lived past it.
The world's male chivalry has perished out, but women are knights-errant to the last; and, if Cervantes had been greater still, he had made his Don a Donna.
I would not be a rose upon the wall
A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
To say to a courtier, Pluck that rose for me,
It's prettier than the rest. O Romney Leigh!
I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,
Than lie in a great queen's bosom.
Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.
Tis aye a solemn thing to me
To look upon a babe that sleeps --
Wearing in its spirit-deeps
The unrevealed mystery
Of its Adam's taint and woe,
Which, when they revealed lie,
Will not let it slumber so.
Wall must get the weather stain Before they grow the ivy.
What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use.
And if God choose I shall but love thee better after death.
Utterance is the evidence of foregone study.
True knowledge comes only through suffering.
O Earth, so full of dreary noises!
O men, with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold, the wader's heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God makes a silence through you all,
And giveth His beloved, sleep.
In this abundant earth no doubt
Is little room for things worn out:
Disdain them, break them, throw them by!
And if before the days grew rough
We once were lov'd, us'd -- well enough,
I think, we've far'd, my heart and I.
Of all the thoughts of God that are Borne inward unto souls afar, Along the Psalmist's music deep, Now tell me if that any is. For gift or grace, surpassing this -- He giveth His beloved sleep.
The devil's most devilish when respectable.
And yet, because I love thee, I obtain
From that same love this vindicating grace,
To live on still in love, and yet in vain.
Some people always sigh in thanking God.
Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain.
She has seen the mystery hid Under Egypt's pyramid: By those eyelids pale and close Now she knows what Rhamses knows.
And trade is art, and art's philosophy,
In Paris.
Women know the way to rear up children (to be just). They know a simple, merry, tender knack of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes, and stringing pretty words that make no sense. And kissing full sense into empty words.
Two human loves make one divine.
Thank God for grace, Ye who weep only! If, as some have done, Ye grope tear-blinded in a desert place And touch but tombs, -- look up! Those tears will run Soon in long rivers down the lifted face, And leave the vision clear for stars and sun.
Yes, I answered you last night; No, this morning, sir, I say: Colors seen by candle-light Will not look the same by day.
The critics could never mortify me out of heart -- because I love poetry for its own sake, -- and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.
You're something between a dream and a miracle.
I love you for the part of me that you bring out.
No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.
Quotes by Elizabeth Barrett Browning are featured in:
Inspirational Quotes
Motivational Quotes
Short Love Quotes