A great man leaves clean work behind him, and requires no sweeper up of the chips.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Greatness
What monster have we here? A great Deed at this hour of day? A great just deed—and not for pay? Absurd—or insincere?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Good Deeds, Deeds, Goodness
Named softly as the household name of one whom God had taken.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Names
Books, books, books had found the secret of a garret-room piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,—where, creeping in and out among the giant fossils of my past, like some small nimble mouse between the ribs of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there at this or that box, pulling through the gap, in heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, the first book first. And how I felt it beat under my pillow, in the morning’s dark. An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Reading, Books
God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Gift, God, Dreams
The devil’s most devilish when respectable.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Evil
Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed. But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong for the rest!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination… down our earth to rake … .
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Exaggeration
A good neighbor sometimes cuts your morning up to mince-meat of the very smallest talk, then helps to sugar her bohea at night with your reputation.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Neighbors
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
He, in his developed manhood, stood, a little sunburn by the glare of life.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: World
A woman’s always younger than a man of equal years.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Aging, Age
And lips say “God be pitiful,” who never said, “God be praised.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Religion
Since when was genius found respectable?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Genius
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air beat upward to god’s throne in loud access of shrieking and reproach
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Grieving, Grief
God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers, And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face. A gauntlet with a gift in’t.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Prayer
Eve is a twofold mystery.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Women
Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Mothers, Family
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Beauty
We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet’s hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Goodness
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it,—prate of woman’s rights, of woman’s mission, woman’s function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, “A woman’s function plainly is… to talk.” Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Women
Experience, like a pale musician, holds a dulcimer of patience in his hand.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Experience
The man, most man,
Works best for men, and, if most men indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul:
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The Spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And Love, the soul of soul, within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Men
The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, “Let no one be called happy till his death”; to which I would add, “Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Happiness
But the child’s sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Children
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
The place is all awave with trees,
Limes, myrtles, purple-beaded,
Acacias having drunk the lees
Of the night-dew, fain headed,
And wan, grey olive-woods, which seem
The fittest foliage for a dream.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Let no one till his death
Be called unhappy. Measure not the work
Until the day’s out and the labor done:
Then bring your gauges.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Sadness, Work, Resolve, Unhappiness, Perseverance, Endurance
And each man stands with his face in the light of his own drawn sword. Ready to do what a hero can.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time
Two human loves make one divine.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Marriage
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Christina Rossetti English Poet
- Anne Bradstreet American Poet
- Letitia Elizabeth Landon English Poet, Novelist
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu English Aristocrat, Poet
- Frances Ridley Havergal English Anglican Poet
- John Dryden English Poet
- Christopher Marlowe English Playwright
- Robert Browning English Poet
- Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
- Coventry Patmore English Writer
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