Inspirational Quotes by William Cullen Bryant (American Poet)

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was an American poet, journalist, and editor whose work helped define the early literary character of the United States. As one of the first major voices in American Romanticism, he became known for contemplative nature poetry, classical restraint, and a distinctive ability to invest American landscapes with philosophical meaning. His long tenure as editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post further established him as an influential cultural and political figure.

Born in Cummington, Massachusetts, Bryant grew up in a New England household shaped by reading, religion, and civic engagement. He briefly attended Williams College before financial pressures forced his departure, after which he studied law through apprenticeship rather than formal schooling. Admitted to the bar at twenty-one, he practiced law for nearly a decade while continuing to write poetry, publishing early works such as “Thanatopsis” (1817,) “To a Waterfowl” (1818,) and Poems (1821.) In 1825 he moved to New York City to join the Evening Post, rising quickly to editor-in-chief and guiding the paper’s literary and political direction for fifty years.

Bryant’s later career brought a steady stream of publications that reinforced his national stature. Collections such as The Fountain and Other Poems (1842,) Letters of a Traveller (1850,) and Thirty Poems (1864) broadened his reputation, while his admired translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey demonstrated his classical ambitions and scholarly range.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Cullen Bryant

Truth crushed to earth will rise again; the eternal years of God are hers; but error wounded writhes in pain, and dies amid her worshippers.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Truth

Difficulty is a nurse of greatness—a harsh nurse, who rocks her foster children roughly, but rocks them into strength and athletic proportions.—The mind, grappling with great aims and wrestling with mighty impediments, grows by a certain necessity to the stature of greatness.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Greatness, Difficulty, Adversity, Strength, Greatness & Great Things

Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Truth

God hath yoked to guilt, her pale tormentor, misery.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Guilt

Let me often to these solitudes retire, and in their presence reassure my feeble virtue.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Retirement

Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
—William Cullen Bryant

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Autumn

Gently – so have good men taught –
Gently, and without grief, the old shall glide
Into the new; the eternal flow of things,
Like a bright river of the fields of heaven,
Shall journey onward in perpetual peace.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Death

To him who, in the love of Nature, holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Nature

Remorse is virtue’s root; its fair increase are fruits of innocence and blessedness.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Remorse

All that tread, the globe are but a handful to the tribes, that slumber in its bosom.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Dying, Death

The press is good or evil according to the character of those who direct it.—It is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper.—Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.
—William Cullen Bryant

They talk of short-lived pleasures: be it so; pain dies as quickly, and lets her weary prisoner go; the fiercest agonies have shortest reign.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Pain

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sere.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Sadness, Seasons, Autumn

Features—the great soul’s apparent seat.
—William Cullen Bryant

Weep not that the world changes – did it keep a stable, changeless state, it were cause indeed to weep.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Change

The sad and solemn night hath yet her multitude of cheerful fires;
The glorious host of light walk the dark hemisphere till she retires;
All through her silent watches, gliding slow,
Her constellations come, and climb the heavens, and go.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Stars

Look on this beautiful world, and read the truth in her fair page.
—William Cullen Bryant
Topics: Beauty, Nature

Inspirational Quotes by William Cullen Bryant (American Poet)

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply