Explore Quotes by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

A woman is always younger than a man at equal years.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

He said true things, but called them by wrong names.

What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

The little cares that fretted me, I lost them yesterday Among the fields above the sea, Among the winds at play.

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father’s name; Piled high, packed large,--where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning’s dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books!

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.

All actual heroes are essential men, And all men possible heroes.

My patience has dreadful chilblains from standing so long on a monument.

The least flower, with brimming cup, may stand and share its dew drop with another near.

Books are men of higher stature, and the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear.

The man, most man, works best for men: and, if most man indeed, he gets his manhood plainest from his soul.

Silence is the best response to a fool.

So mothers have God's license to be missed.

My love for him was so exquisitely pure that if we all were capable of giving and receiving such a beautiful gift the world would be a far more brilliant place; I think we'd all be poets.

Eyes of gentianellas azure, _x000D_ Staring, winking at the skies.

And I smiled to think God's greatness flowed around our incompleteness; Round our restlessness, His rest.

I heard an angel speak last night/And he said, "Write!"

And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

God Himself is the best Poet, And the Real is His song.