Title Image - Quotes by Author Lord ByronPhoto Credit: WikiMedia Commons

Whatsoever thy birth, Thou wert a beautiful thought, and softly bodied forth.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

Dead scandals form good subjects for dissection.

--Lord Byron

The dome of thought, the palace of the soul.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron


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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

Now I shall go to sleep. Goodnight.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

Longer Version:

Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality. And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.


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.

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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?

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

Longer Version:

One certainly has a soul; but how it came to allow itself to be enclosed in a body is more than I can imagine. I only know if once mine gets out, I'll have a bit of a tussle before I let it get in again to that of any other.


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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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!

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

This is the age of oddities let loose.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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?

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

I deny nothing, but doubt everything.

--Lord Byron

Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

Man's conscience is the oracle of God.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

You should have a softer pillow than my heart.

--Lord Byron

There is pleasure in the pathless woods.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

Exhausting thought, And hiving wisdom with each studious year.

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

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

--Lord Byron

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.

--Lord Byron

Know a quote that we are missing? Please use our suggest a quote form below and let us know. Thank YOU for visiting -- we wish you a perfect day!