Robert Browning (1812–89) was a prolific Victorian-era English poet and playwright. His complex psychological novel is the forerunner of modern fiction’s obsession with unreliable narrators and shifting narrative perspectives.
Born in Camberwell, London, Browning was an intelligent child. He was deeply influenced by his father’s wide-ranging collection of more than 6,000 books in Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish.
By the time he was five, Browning could read and write well. He was a big fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley and asked for all of Shelley’s works for his thirteenth birthday. By the age of fourteen, Browning had learned Latin, Greek, and French.
Browning is widely recognized as a master of dramatic, evocative monologues, and psychological portraiture. His major work, Men and Women (1855,) contains his most exceptional dramatic monologues, such as “Love Among the Ruins,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Andrea del Sarto,” and “Bishop Bloughram’s Apology.”
Browning is best known for the children’s poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” His distinguished poem The Ring and the Book (1868–69) is a 21,000-line poem in four volumes derived from a 17th-century Roman murder trial. The story unfolds in the form of unreliable and incomplete claims and accusations of nine speakers. In this work, Browning achieved confusing yet informative relativity of perception that served to reiterate that experience is never distinct from who we are and how we see.
Browning was married to the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert Browning
Go practice if you please with men and women: leave a child alone for Christ’s particular love’s sake!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Evangelism
So, fall asleep love, loved by me….for I know love, I am loved by thee.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Romance
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Fiction
Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Mind
There’s a new tribunal now higher than God’s—The educated man s!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Education
I … know what I do, and am unmoved by men’s blame, or their praise either.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Awareness, Acceptance, Realization
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Love
Ambition is not what man does… but what man would do.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Ambition
Truth lies within ourselves: it takes no rise from outward things, whatever you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness and to Know rather consists in opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape than in effecting entry for light supposed to be without.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Thought, Reason, Truth
Truth never hurts the teller.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Truth
O lyric Love, half angel and half bird. And all a wonder and a wild desire.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Desire, Desires
There are those who believe something, and therefore will tolerate nothing; and on the other hand, those who tolerate everything, because they believe nothing.
—Robert Browning
My sun sets to rise again.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Optimism
In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity;
On earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools – that’s vanity.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Vanity
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Ignorance, Innocence
‘Twere too absurd to slight for the hereafter, the day’s delight.
—Robert Browning
Topics: The Present
Fail I alone, in words and deeds?
Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Failure
Love is energy of life.
—Robert Browning
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Trust
Man seeks his own good at the whole world’s cost.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Man
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.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Defeat
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Ambition
Less is more.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Property, Design, Possessions
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Writing, Writers
Strike when thou wilt, the hour of rest, but let my last days be my best.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Solitude
Good, to forgive; Best to forget.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Forgiveness
Where the apple reddens never pry—lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Curiosity
The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don’t really seem to know any more about the game than the old ones did.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Golf
It’s like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;
Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now.
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Death, Sincerity
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