Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

I dislike an eye that twinkles like a star. Those only are beautiful which, like the planets, have a steady lambent light, are luminous, but not sparkling.

I hear the wind among the trees Playing the celestial symphonies; I see the branches downward bent, Like keys of some great instrument.

The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.

Stars of earth, these golden flowers; emblems of our own great resurrection; emblems of the bright and better land.

Let us, then, be what we are; speak what we think; and in all things keep ourselves loyal to truth.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

The country is not priest-ridded, but press-ridden.

I stay a little longer, as one stays, to cover up the embers that still burn.

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.

The soul never grows old.

The spring came suddenly, bursting upon the world as a child bursts into a room, with a laugh and a shout and hands full of flowers.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts.

Every man has his secret sorrows.

Life like an empty dream flits by.

Death is the chillness that precedes the dawn; We shudder for a moment, then awake In the broad sunshine of the other life.

O little feet! that such long years Must wander on through hopes and fears, Must ache and bleed beneath your load; I, nearer to the wayside inn Where toil shall cease and rest begin, Am weary, thinking of your road!

Often times we call a man [or woman] cold when he [or she] is only sad.

Defeat may be victory in disguise.

Day, like a weary pilgrim, had reached the western gate of heaven, and Evening stooped down to unloose the latchets of his sandal shoon.

Authors must not, like Chinese soldiers, expect to win victories by turning somersets in the air.

The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.

How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending,--the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time.

Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth, to some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, there are no birds in last year's nest!

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.

The day is done; and slowly from the scene the stooping sun upgathers his spent shafts, and puts them back into his golden quiver!

So disasters come not singly; But as if they watched and waited, Scanning one another's motions, When the first descends, the others Follow, follow, gathering flock-wiseRound their victim, sick and wounded, First a shadow, then a sorrow, Till the air is dark with anguish.

White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest . . . White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky.

Life is the gift of God, and is divine.

In ourselves are triumph and defeat.

Listen my children and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere

It is autumn; not without But within me is the cold. Youth and spring are all about; It is I that have grown old.

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

The rays of happiness, like those of light, are colorless when unbroken.

A great sorrow, like a mariner's quadrant, brings the sun at noon down to the horizon, and we learn where we are on the sea of life.

The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

Art is the child of nature in whom we trace the features of the mothers face.

Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood.

And when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence.

The air is full of farewells to the dying. And mournings for the dead.

Success is not something to wait for, it is something to work for.

The little I have seen of the world teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends, I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellow-man with Him from whose hand it came.

Fair words gladden so many a heart.

Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.

The morning pouring everywhere, its golden glory on the air.

Method is more important than strength, when you wish to control your enemies. By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed To have a passer-by kill the snake for the beads.

The Nile, forever new and old, Among the living and the dead, Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled.