James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
Browning
All good things / Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now / Than flesh helps soul.
Be our joy three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; / Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
Dante, who loved well because he hated, / Hated wickedness that hinders loving.
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.
For I say this is death, and the sole death, / When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain, / Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance, / And lack of love from love made manifest.
God is the perfect poet, / Who in His person acts His own creations.
God made all the creatures, and gave them our love and our fear, / To give sign we and they are His children, one family here.
God’s in His heaven: / All’s right with the world!
God’s justice, tardy though it prove perchance, / Rests never on the track till it reach / Delinquency.
Happy that I can / Be crossed and thwarted as a man, / Not left in God’s contempt apart, / With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, / Tame in earth’s paddock, as her prize.
Have you found your life distasteful? / My life did, and does, smack sweet. / Was your youth of pleasure wasteful? / Mine I saved and hold complete. / Do your joys with age diminish? / When mine fail me, I’ll complain. / Must in death your daylight finish? / My sun sets to rise again.
He who did well in war just earns the right / To begin doing well in peace.
How can man love but what he yearns to help?
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ / All the heart, and the soul, and the senses for ever in joy!
I count life just a stuff / To try the soul’s strength on.
I never could tread a single pleasure under foot.
I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ, / Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee / All questions on the earth and out of it.
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
If you desire faith, then you’ve faith enough.
Imperfection means perfection hid, / Reserved in part to grace the after-time.
It’s wiser being good than bad; / It’s safer being meek than fierce; It’s fitter being sane than mad / My own hope is, a sun will pierce / The thickest cloud earth ever stretch’d; / That after last returns the first, / Though a wide compass round be fetch’d; / That what began best can’t end worst, / Nor what God blessèd once prove accurst.
Life is probation, and this earth no goal, / But starting-point of man.
Life just the stuff / To try the soul’s strength on, educe the man.
Life with all it yields of joy and woe, / And hope and fear, / Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love, / How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.
Like the hand which ends a dream, / Death, with the might of his sunbeam, / Touches the flesh and the soul awakes.
Man is not God, but hath God’s end to serve, / A master to obey, a course to take, / Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become.
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.
O let my books be then the eloquence / And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Only I discern / Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn.
Other heights in other lives, God willing.
Progress is the law of life—man is not man as yet.
Progress, man’s distinctive mark alone, / Not God’s and not the beasts: God is, they are; / Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
Stung by straitness of our life, made strait / On purpose to make sweet the life at large.
That we devote ourselves to God is seen / In living just as though no God there were.
This low man seeks a little thing to do, / Sees it and does it; / This high man, with a great thing to pursue, / Dies ere he knows it.
’Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do.
True love works never for the loved one so, / Nor spares skin-surface, smoothing truth away.
Untwine me from the mass / Of deeds which make up life, one deed / Power shall fall short in or exceed.
Was never evening yet / But seemed far beautifuller than its day.
(We) feel that life is large, and the world small, / So wait till life have passed from out the world.
What matter though I doubt at every pore … / If finally I have a life to show, / The thing I did, brought out in evidence / Against the thing done to me underground / By hell and all its brood, for aught I know?
What’s come to perfection perishes. / Things learned on earth we shall practise in heaven; / Works done least rapidly art most cherishes.
When the fight begins within himself, / A man’s worth something.
Wide our world displays its worth, man’s strife and strife’s success, / All the good and beauty, wonder crowning wonder, / Till my heart and soul applaud perfection, nothing less.