Quotes

So shaken as we are, so wan with care.

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women, If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The natives of the rain are rainy men.

Is this the hill? is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree?

Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet Which fourteen hundred years ago were nail’d For our advantage on the bitter cross.

Come Muse migrate from Greece and Ionia, Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts, That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath, and Aeneas’, Odysseus’ wanderings, Placard “Removed” and “To Let” on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus.

It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern’st good-night.

The plum survives its poems.

No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, The bed be blest that I lie on. Four angels to my bed, Four angels round my head, 1 One to watch, and one to pray, And two to bear my soul away.

I know you all, and will a while uphold The unyok’d humor of your idleness: Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work.

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

Green crammers of the green fruits of the world.

And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf’s young.

You tread upon my patience.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight.

The attempt and not the deed Confounds us.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

“Ha! ha!” quoth he, “full plain I see, The Devil knows how to row.”

This only grant me, that my means may lie Too low for envy, for contempt too high.

Came there a certain lord, neat, and trimly dress’d, Fresh as a bridegroom; and his chin new-reap’d, Show’d like a stubble-land at harvest-home: He was perfumed like a milliner, And ’twixt his finger and his thumb he held A pouncet-box, which ever and anon He gave his nose and took ’t away again.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach.

And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by, He call’d them untaught knaves, unmannerly, To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse Betwixt the wind and his nobility.

Words! book-words! what are you?

Had he not resembled My father as he slept I had done ’t.

Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.

O Wedding Guest! This soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely ’twas, that God himself Scarce seemèd there to be.

Well then; I now do plainly see This busy world and I shall ne’er agree; The very honey of all earthly joy Does of all meats the soonest cloy, And they (methinks) deserve my pity, Who for it can endure the stings, The crowd, and buzz and murmurings, Of this great hive, the city.