Quotes by Lord Byron
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Whatsoever thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.

Bologna is celebrated for producing popes, painters, and sausage.

For there was soft remembrance, and sweet trust
In one fond breast, to which his own would melt,
And in its tenderer hour on that his bosom dwelt.

Methinks the older that one grows,
Inclines us more to laugh the scold, though laughter
Leaves us so doubly serious shortly after.

The world is a bundle of hay, Mankind are the asses that pull, Each tugs in a different way And the greatest of all is John Bull!

Oh, Christ! it is a goodly sight to see What Heaven hath done for this delicious land!

Dead scandals form good subjects for dissection.

The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.

The stars are forth, the moon above the tops Of the snow-shining mountains -- beautiful! I linger yet with nature, for the night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man, and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness I learned the language of another world.

All human history attests That happiness for man, -- the hungry sinner! -- Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner. ~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99.

He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, And how to scale a fortress -- or a nunnery.

Well, well, the world must turn upon its axis, And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails, And live and die, make love and pay our taxes, And as the veering winds shift, shift our sails.

O ye! who teach the ingenious youth of nations, Holland, France, England, Germany or Spain, I pray ye flog them upon all occasions, It mends their morals, never mind the pain.

If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men.

But as to women, who can penetrate the real sufferings of their she condition? Man's very sympathy with their estate has much of selfishness and more suspicion. Their love, their virtue, beauty, education, but form good housekeepers, to breed a nation.

Grief should be the instructor of the wise; Sorrow is Knowledge.

It is the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.

The lapse of ages changes all things -- time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.

Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.

Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight.

I am surrounded here by parsons and methodists, but as you will see, not infested with the mania.

Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story; The days of our youth are the days of our glory; And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

Above or Love, Hope, Hate or Fear, It lives all passionless and pure: An age shall fleet like earthly year; Its years in moments shall endure. Away, away, without a wing, O'er all, through all, its thought shall fly; A nameless and eternal thing, Forgetting what it was to die.

And I would hear yet once before I perish The voice which was my music... Speak to me!

One of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer.

So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, No more through rolling clouds to soar again, View'd his own feather on the fatal dart, And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart.

Nor all that heralds rake from coffin'd clay, Nor florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more! though fallen, great!

Sleep hath its own world, and the wide realm of wild reality.

Oh, nature's noblest gift, my grey goose quill, Slave of my thoughts, obedient to my will, Torn from the parent bird to form a pen, That mighty instrument of little men.

What an antithetical mind! -- tenderness, roughness -- delicacy, coarseness -- sentiment, sensuality -- soaring and groveling, dirt and deity -- all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

No more we meet in yonder bowers Absence has made me prone to roving; But older, firmer hearts than ours, Have found monotony in loving.

Tyranny Is far the worst of treasons. Dost thou deem None rebels except subjects? The prince who Neglects or violates his trust is more A brigand than the robber-chief.

The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed. I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

In secret we met -- In silence I grieve, That thy heart could forget, Thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee After long years, How should I greet thee? -- With silence and tears.

Such is your cold coquette, who can't say No, And won't say Yes, and keeps you on and off-ing On a lee-shore, till it begins to blow, Then sees your heart wreck'd, with an inward scoffing.

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

We have fools in all sects, and impostors in most; why should I believe mysteries no one can understand, because written by men who chose to mistake madness for inspiration and style themselves Evangelicals?

I am no Platonist, I am nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist, Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other.

My beautiful, my own
My only Venice-this is breath! Thy breeze
Thine Adrian sea-breeze, how it fans my face!
Thy very winds feel native to my veins,
And cool them into calmness!

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine.

Though the day of my Destiny 's over, And the star of my Fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find.

There's music in the sighing of a reed; There's music in the gushing of a rill; There's music in all things, if men had ears; The earth is but the music of the spheres.

Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep for here There is such matter for all feelings: Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.

Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!

Whenever I meet with anything agreeable in this world it surprises me so much -- and pleases me so much (when my passions are not interested in one way or the other) that I go on wondering for a week to come.

A legal broom's a moral chimney-sweeper, And that's the reason he himself's so dirty.

The devil hath not, in all his quiver's choice, An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.

Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylæ!

Why do they call me misanthrope? Because They hate me, not I them.

Do proper homage to thine idol's eyes; But no too humbly, or she will despise Thee and thy suit, though told in moving tropes: Disguise even tenderness if thou art wise.

But there are wanderers o'er Eternity Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor'd ne'er shall be.

The Christian has greatly the advantage of the unbeliever, having everything to gain and nothing to lose.

O Gold! I still prefer thee unto paper, which makes bank credit like a bark of vapour.

All tragedies are finished by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.

My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief, Are mine alone!

Good work and joyous play go hand in hand. When play stops, old age begins. Play keeps you from taking life too seriously.

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast;
Is that portentous phrase, I told you so.

Be hypocritical, be cautious, be not what you seem but always what you see.

Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?.

The basis of your religion is injustice. The Son of God the pure, the immaculate, the innocent, is sacrificed for the guilty. This proves his heroism, but no more does away with man's sin than a school boy's volunteering to be flogged for another would exculpate a dunce from negligence.

Time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake.

This is the age of oddities let loose.

I am as comfortless as a pilgrim with peas in his shoes -- and as cold as Charity, Chastity or any other Virtue.

I can't but say it is an awkward sight To see one's native land receding through The growing waters; it unmans one quite, Especially when life is rather new.

There is music in all things, if men had ears.

From the mingled strength of shade and light A new creation rises to my sight, Such heav'nly figures from his pencil flow, So warm with light his blended colors glow... . The glowing portraits, fresh from life, that bring Home to our hearts the truth from which they spring.

The reason that adulation is not displeasing is that, though untrue, it shows one to be of consequence enough, in one way or other, to induce people to lie.

By Heaven! it is a splendid sight to see For one who hath no friend, no brother there.

But beef is rare within these oxless isles; Goat's flesh there is, no doubt, and kid, and mutton; And, when a holiday upon them smiles, A joint upon their barbarous spits they put on.

Scion of chiefs and monarchs, where art thou? Fond hope of many nations, art thou dead? Could not the grave forget thee, and lay low Some less majestic, less beloved head?

Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains; They crown'd him long ago On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, With a diadem of snow.

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels.

Few things surpass old wine; and they may preach Who please, the more because they preach in vain.

I am the very slave of circumstance And impulse borne away with every breath! Misplaced upon the throne misplaced in life. I know not what I could have been, but feel I am not what I should be let it end.

Man's conscience is the oracle of God.

He scratched his ear, the infallible resource to which embarrassed people have recourse.

You should have a softer pillow than my heart.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods.

Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull.

I've seen your stormy seas and stormy women, And pity lovers rather more than seamen.

Physicians mend or end us, Secundum artem; but although we sneer -- In health -- when ill we call them to attend us, Without the least propensity to jeer.

What a strange thing is man! And what a stranger is woman.

On the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended oar.

A sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.

Exhausting thought, And hiving wisdom with each studious year.

It has been said that the immortality of the soul is a grand peut-tre -but still it is a grand one. Everybody clings to it -the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is still persuaded that he is immortal.

The art of angling, the cruelest, the coldest and the stupidest of pretended sports.

Yet truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires, And decorate the verse herself inspires: This fact, in virtue's name, let Crabbe attest,- Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best.