Quotations by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807–1882) WAS A RENOWNED 19TH-CENTURY NOVELIST AND POET.

“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Secret of the Sea

“No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Endymion (1842)

“Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night

“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day

“Every heart has its secret sorrows which the world knows not, and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. III, Ch. IV (1839)

“Look not mournfully into the Past. It comes not back again. Wisely improve the Present. It is thine. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion, Bk. IV, Ch. VIII (1839)

 “Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day

“I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song (1845)

 “God sent his Singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and of mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Singers (1849)

“The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Ladder of St. Augustine, st. 10

“A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Santa Filomena, st. 10 (1858)

“Time has laid his hand
Upon my heart, gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend, Pt. IV, The Cloisters (1872)

“The grave itself is but a covered bridge,
Leading from light to light, through a brief darkness!”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend, Pt. V, A Covered Bridge at Lucerne

“All nature, he holds, is a respiration
Of the Spirit of God, who, in breathing hereafter
Will inhale it into his bosom again,
So that nothing but God alone will remain.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Golden Legend, Pt. VI, A travelling Scholastic affixing his Theses to the gate of the College

“The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Holidays (1878)

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christmas Bells

“For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus

“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Voices of the Night

“Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Builders (1849)

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Quotations by Wallace Stevens

WALLACE STEVENS IS A 20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN POET.

“The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

 

“If sex were all, then every trembling hand
Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

 

“We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 

“For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

 

“The way through the world
Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose

 

“I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

 

“The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yellows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Study of Two Pears

 

“Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill”

~ Wallace Stevens, A Postcard from the Volcano

 

“After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

 

“Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

 

“The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become,”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

 

“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
       Hills and a cloud.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Of the Surface of Things

 

“Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

 

“As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.”

~ Wallace Stevens, The Sun This March

 

“Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

“After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Connoisseur of Chaos

 

“Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

 

“Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

 

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.”

~ Wallace Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier

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Quotations by Sophocles

SOPHOCLES (C. 496 - C. 406 BCE), A PROMINENT ANCIENT GREEK TRAGEDIAN.

“Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who thinks that,
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—
A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“In time you will know this well: For time, and time alone, will show the just man, though scoundrels are discovered in a day.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

 “Let every man in mankind's frailty consider his last day; and let none presume on his good fortune until he find Life, at his death, a memory without pain.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you.
All men make mistakes, it is only human.
But once the wrong is done, a man
can turn his back on folly, misfortune too,
if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen,
and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness
brands you for stupidity - pride is a crime.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Men of ill judgment oft ignore the good
That lies within their hands, till they have lost it.”

~ Sophocles, Ajax

 

 “There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“To throw away an honest friend is, as it were, to throw your life away”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“If you try to cure evil with evil
you will add more pain to your fate.”

~ Sophocles, Ajax

 

“I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Time, which sees all things, has found you out.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“I was born to join in love, not hate –

that is my nature.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Tomorrow is tomorrow.
Future cares have future cures,
And we must mind today.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“We have only a little time to please the living.

But all eternity to love the dead.”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“How dreadful the knowledge of the truth can be
When there’s no help in truth.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the man that's wise!
This I knew well, but had forgotten it,
else I would not have come here.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Death is not the worst; rather, in vain
To wish for death, and not to compass it.”

~ Sophocles, Electra

 

“Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“A man's anger can never age and fade away, not until he dies. The dead alone feel no pain.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

 

 “One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

 

“It is not right

if I am wrong. But if I am young, and right,

what does my age matter?”

~ Sophocles, Antigone

 

“How terrible-- to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;
but when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
To speak dishonorably is pardonable.”

~ Sophocles, Creusa

 

“Give me a life wherever there is an opportunity to live, and better life than was my father's.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

 

“We long to have again the vanished past, in spite of all its pain.”

~ Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

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