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
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Writing, Writers
No sketches first, no studies, that
—Robert Browning
Topics: Art
‘Tis looking downward makes one dizzy.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Adversity
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Ambition
Good, to forgive; Best to forget.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Forgiveness
I … know what I do, and am unmoved by men’s blame, or their praise either.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Acceptance, Awareness, Realization
When the fight begins within himself, a man’s worth something.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Self-Discovery, Control, Conflict, Fighting, Discipline, Self-Control, Fight
Grow old with me the best is yet to come.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Age, Aging
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Kiss
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
When a man’s busy, leisure strikes him as a wonderful pleasure; and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Reality, Opportunities
Aspire, break bounds. Endeavor to be good, and better still, best.
—Robert Browning
Love is energy of life.
—Robert Browning
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Togetherness, Lovers, Love
What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Aging, Age
Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Seasons, Autumn
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
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.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Goal
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Democracy, Ambition, General
Strike when thou wilt, the hour of rest, but let my last days be my best.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best God invents.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Beauty
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Hope
A man’s worth something.
—Robert Browning
O lyric Love, half angel and half bird. And all a wonder and a wild desire.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Desires, Desire
Inscribe all human effort with one word, artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete!
—Robert Browning
Topics: Effort
The grand perhaps! We look on helplessly, there the old misgivings, crooked questions are.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Uncertainty
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Innocence, Ignorance
The great mind knows the power of gentleness, only tries force because persuasion fails.
—Robert Browning
Man seeks his own good at the whole world’s cost.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Man
Less is more.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Property, Design, Possessions
Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Fiction
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,
Never doubted clouds would break,
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Courage, Bravery
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Solitude
And gain is gain, however small.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Profit
‘Twere too absurd to slight for the hereafter, the day’s delight.
—Robert Browning
Topics: The Present
June reared the bunch of flowers you carry from seeds of April’s sowing.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Seasons
Where the apple reddens never pry—lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Curiosity
Truth never hurts the teller.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Truth
Fail I alone, in words and deeds?
Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
—Robert Browning
Topics: Failure
‘Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do.
—Robert Browning
Topics: Trying, Ambition
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