Robert Browning Quotes

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.

God is the perfect poet.

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.

Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.

Love is energy of life.

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

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

A minute's success pays the failure of years.

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

Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.

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

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.

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

Faultless to a fault.

At last awake / From life, that insane dream we take / For waking now.

Escape me? Never - Beloved! While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue.

I watched my foolish heart expand / In the lazy glow of benevolence, / O'er the various modes of man's belief.

For thence - a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, / The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, / Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; / Enough that he heard it once; we shall hear it by-and-by.

There may be heaven; there must be hell; / Meantime, there is our earth here - well!

I would have rummaged, ransacked at the word; Those old odd corners of an empty heart; For remnants of dim love the long disused, And dusty crumbling of romance!

And the muttering grew to a grumbling; / And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;/ And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.

The year's at the spring / And day's at the morn; / Morning's at seven; / The hillside's dew-pearled; / The lark's on the wing; / The snail's on the thorn; / God's in his heaven - / All's right with the world!

Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles, And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles, Split open the kegs of salted sprats, Made nests inside men's Sunday hats, And eve.

For I say, this is death, and the sole death, / When a man's loss comes to him from his gain,/ Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, / And lack of love from love made manifest.