Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Better than all measures Of delightful sound, Better than all treasures That in books are found, Thy skilled to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

And the wand-like lily which lifted up, As a Maenad, its moonlight-coloured cup, Till the fiery star, which is its eye, Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep! He hath awaken from the dream of life!

The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

Kings are like stars--they rise and set, they have The worship of the world, but no repose.

In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.

We look before and after, And pine for what is not, Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught: Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

January grey is here, Like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, March with grief doth howl and rave, And April weeps--but, O ye hours! Follow with May's fairest flowers.

All of us, who are worth anything, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.

Sing again, with your dear voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one.

Heaven's ebon vault, Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

There is a snake in thy smile, my dear, And bitter poison within thy tear.

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.

The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

Peter was dull; he was at first Dull;--Oh, so dull--so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed-- Still with his dulness was he cursed-- Dull--beyond all conception--dull.

It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.