Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was an English poet and ascetic. After attending college, he moved to London to become a writer, but could only find menial work and became addicted to opium, and was a street vagrant for years. A married couple read his poetry and rescued him, publishing his first book Poems in 1893. Thompson lived as an unbalanced invalid in Wales and at Storrington, but wrote three books of poetry, with other works and essays, before dying of tuberculosis in 1907.
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Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour; it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor petition that it be commuted into death.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Time, Imagination, Eternity
What you theoretically know, vividly realize.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Getting Going, Inaction, Procrastination
The devil doesn’t know how to sing, only how to howl.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Evil
Summer set lip to earth’s bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Summer
Nothing begins, and nothing ends, That is not paid with moan; For we are born in others pain And perish in our own.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Pain
Whatever has a mystery thrown round it causes the truth to appear more grand and awful.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Truth
All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Immortality
An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Atheism
The desolation and terror of, for the first time, realizing that the mother can lose you, or you her, and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Mothers
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Heaven
In all change, well looked into, the germinal good out-vails the apparent ill.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Change
For we are born in other’s pain, and perish in our own.
—Francis Thompson
Topics: Pain
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