Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes - Page 2

Nor deem the irrevocable Past As wholly wasted wholly vain If rising on its wrecks at last To something nobler we attain.

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Resolve, and thou art free.

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.

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

Be still sad heart and cease repining Behind the clouds the sun is shining Thy fate is the common fate of all Into each life some rain must fall - Some days must be dark and dreary.

Day of the Lord as all our days should be!

My soul is full of longingfor the secret of the sea,and the heart of the great oceansends a thrilling pulse through me.

If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous and the perpetual exercise of God’s power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be.

How Beautiful is the rain!After the dust and heat,In the broad and fiery street,In the narrow lane,How beautiful is the rain!How it clatters along the roofs,Like the tramp of hoofs!How it gushes and struggles outFrom the throat of the overflowing spout!Across the window-paneIt pours and pours;And swift and wide,With a muddy tide,Like a river down the gutter roarsThe rain, the welcome rain!-"Rain in Summer

Sadly as some old mediaeval knightGazed at the arms he could no longer wield,The sword two-handed and the shining shieldSuspended in the hall, and full in sight,While secret longings for the lost delightOf tourney or adventure in the fieldCame over him, and tears but half concealedTrembled and fell upon his beard of white,So I behold these books upon their shelf,My ornaments and arms of other days;Not wholly useless, though no longer used,For they remind me of my other self,Younger and stronger, and the pleasant waysIn which I walked, now clouded and confused.

How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams With its illusions aspirations dreams! Book of Beginnings Story without End Each maid a heroine and each man a friend!

The nearer the dawn the darker the night.

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, our faith triumphant o’er our fears, are all with thee – are all with thee!

Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.

The present is the blocks with which we build.

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.

If I am not worth the wooing I surely am not worth the winning.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sand of time; Footprints, that perhaps another, Sailing o'er life's solenm main, A forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, shall take heart again. Let us then be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

His imagination seemed still to exhaust itself in running, before it tried to leap the ditch. While he mused, the fire burned in other brains. Other hands wrote the books he dreamed about. He freely used his good ideas in conversation, and in letters; and they were straightway wrought into the texture of other men's books, and so lost to him for ever.

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Every human heart is human.

Why don't you speak for yourself John?

And in despair I bowed my head;"There is no peace on earth," I said;"For hate is strong,And mocks the songOf peace on earth, good-will to men!"Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep!The Wrong shall fail,the Right prevail,With peace on earth, good-will to men!

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.

The student has his Rome, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.

If you would hit the mark you must aim a little above it: Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

Into each life some rain must fall some days must be dark and dreary.

It is the mystery of the unknownThat fascinates us; we are children stillWayward and wistful; with one hand we clingTo the familiar things we call our own,And with the other, resolute of will,Grope in the dark for what the day will bring

Anon from the castle wallsThe crescent banner falls,And the crowd beholds instead,Like a portent in the sky,Iskander's banner fly,The Black Eagle with double head;And a shout ascends on high,For men's souls are tired of the Turks,And their wicked ways and works,That have made of Ak-HissarA city of the plague;And the loud, exultant cryThat echoes wide and farIs: "Long live Scanderbeg!

Trust no Future howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead!

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it;Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

Ah to build to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

Life is real! Life is earnest!And the grave is not its goal;Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,Was not spoken of the soul.

Think of your woods and orchards without birds!Of empty nests that cling to boughs and beamsAs in an idiot's brain remembered wordsHang empty 'mid the cobwebs of his dreams!

The night shall be filled with music And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs And as silently steal away.

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,We sailed for the Hesperides,The land where golden apples grow;But that, ah! that was long ago.How far, since then, the ocean streamsHave swept us from that land of dreams,That land of fiction and of truth,The lost Atlantis of our youth!Whither, ah, whither? Are not theseThe tempest-haunted Orcades,Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!Here in thy harbors for a whileWe lower our sails; a while we restFrom the unending, endless quest.

Hope has as many lives as a cat or a king.

One if by land, two if by sea.

Let us then be up and doing with a heart for any fate.

The writer of this legend then recordsIts ghostly application in these words:The image is the Adversary old,Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;Our lusts and passions are the downward stairThat leads the soul from a diviner air;The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;The knights and ladies all whose flesh and boneBy avarice have been hardened into stone;The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelfTempts from his books and from his nobler self.The scholar and the world! The endless strife,The discord in the harmonies of life!The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books;The market-place, the eager love of gain,Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!

A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Lives of great men all remind usWe can make our lives sublime,And, departing, leave behind usFootprints on the sands of time;Footprints, that perhaps another,Sailing o'er life's solemn main,A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,Seeing, shall take heart again.

There was an old belief that in the embersOf all things their primordial form exists, And cunning alchemistsCould re-create the rose with all its membersFrom its own ashes, but without the bloom, Without the lost perfume Ah me! what wonder-working, occult scienceCan from the ashes in our hearts once more The rose of youth restore?What craft of alchemy can bid defianceTo time and change, and for a single hour Renew this phantom-flower?

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too lateTill the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.Cato learned Greek at eighty; SophoclesWrote his grand Oedipus, and SimonidesBore off the prize of verse from his compeers,When each had numbered more than fourscore years,And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,Had but begun his Characters of Men.Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,Completed Faust when eighty years were past,These are indeed exceptions; but they showHow far the gulf-stream of our youth may flowInto the arctic regions of our lives.Where little else than life itself survives.

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.

And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares, that infest the day,Shall fold their tents like the Arabs,and silently steal away.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,And our hearts, though stout and brave,Still, like muffled drums, are beatingFuneral marches to the grave.

Youth comes but once in a lifetime.

Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.

Time ... is the life of the soul.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!

Ye are better than all the balladsThat ever were sung or said;For ye are living poems,And all the rest are dead.

In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.

Tell me not in mournful numbers Life is but an empty dream!

Ah, Nothing is too late, till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.

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.

Every dew-drop and raindrop had a whole heaven within it.