Robert Browning Quotes

"A minute's success pays the failure of years."

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. Or what's a heaven for?"

"Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do."

"And gain is gain, however small."

"Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay."

"Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?"

"Faultless to a fault."

"Go practice if you please with men and women: leave a child alone for Christ's particular love's sake!"

"God is the perfect poet."

"Grow old with me! The best is yet to be."

"How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!"

"I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on."

"If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents."

"Inscribe all human effort with one word, artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!"

"Kiss me as if you made believe You were not sure this eve, How my face, your flower, had pursed It's petals up."

"Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top."

"Love is energy of life."

"Man partly is and wholly hopes to be."

"Motherhood: All love begins and ends there."

"My sun sets to rise again."

"Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!"

"O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird and all a wonder and a wild desire."

"Of what I call God, And fools call Nature."

"Oh, to be in England now that April's there."

"One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake."

"Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked."

"Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought."

"Take away love and our earth is a tomb."

"That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!"

"The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer."

"The moment eternal - just that and no more - When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!"

"'Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man Would do!"

"We loved, sir - used to meet: how sad and bad and mad it was - but the, how it was sweet!"

"What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?"

"What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew."

"What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold."

"White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice."

"Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once."

"You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls."