The devil’s most devilish when respectable.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Evil
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, Goodness, Deeds
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
Men get opinions as boys learn to spell by reiteration chiefly.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Opinions, Opinion
But the child’s sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Children
This race is never grateful: from the first, One fills their cup at supper with pure wine, Which back they give at cross-time on a sponge, In bitter vinegar.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Gratitude
Hurt a fly! He would not for the world: he’s pitiful to flies even. “Sing,” says he, “and tease me still, if that’s your way, poor insect.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Beauty
O rose, who dares to name thee?
No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet,
But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubblewheat,—
Kept seven years in a drawer, thy titles shame thee.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Remembrance
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: Books, Reading
Two human loves make one divine.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Marriage
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl?
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Shame
Who so loves believes the impossible.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Love
He lives most life whoever breathes most air.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Eve is a twofold mystery.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Women
A great man leaves clean work behind him, and requires no sweeper up of the chips.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Greatness
If you desire faith, then you have faith enough.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Faith, Desire
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
We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination… down our earth to rake … .
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Exaggeration
Eternity stands always fronting God; a stern colossal image, with blind eyes, and grand dim lips, that murmur evermore, “God—God—God!”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Eternity
A woman’s always younger than a man of equal years.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Aging, Age
The world’s male chivalry has perished out, but women are knights-errant to the last; and, if Cervantes had been greater still, he had made his Don a Donna.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Bravery, Courage
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: Resolve, Sadness, Perseverance, Unhappiness, Work, Endurance
God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Gift, Dreams, God
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
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: Family, Mothers
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
The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, to put on when you’re weary—or a stool. To stumble over and vex you… “curse that stool!” Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean and sleep, and dream of something we are not, but would be for your sake. Alas, alas! This hurts most, this… that, after all, we are paid the worth of our work, perhaps.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: Housework, Women
He, in his developed manhood, stood, a little sunburn by the glare of life.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Topics: World
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
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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