Quotes

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past, But an eternal now does always last.

Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

What shall I do to be forever known, And make the age to come my own?

Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red.

I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald.

Life is an incurable disease.

The labor we delight in physics pain.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say, Have ye not seen us walking every day? Was there a tree about which did not know The love betwixt us two?

They have made worms’ meat of me.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece! Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope The Lord’s anointed temple, and stole thence The life o’ the building!

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin… in the dust, in the cool tombs.

The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!

God the first garden made, and the first city.

Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Why is there always a secret singing When a lawyer cashes in? Why does a hearse horse snicker Hauling a lawyer away?

Some said, “John, print it”; others said, “Not so.” Some said, “It might do good”; others said, “No.”

O! I am Fortune’s fool.

Had I but died an hour before this chance I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant, There’s nothing serious in mortality, All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of.

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look’st thou so?”—“With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.”