Robert Browning Quotes

Greet the unseen with a cheer!

At midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, When you set your fancies free.

Good, to forgive; Best, to forget ! Living, we fret ; Dying, we live.

I want to know a butcher paints, A baker rhymes for his pursuit, Candlestick-maker much acquaints His soul with song, or, haply mute, Blows out his brains upon the flute.

But, thanks to wine-less and democracy, We’ve still our stage where truth calls spade a spade!

Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain; which must not be.

There’s a new tribunal now Higher than God’s,—the educated man’s!

White shall not neutralize the black, nor good Compensate bad in man, absolve him so: Life’s business being just the terrible choice.

Why comes temptation but for a man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestalled in triumph?

In the great right of an excessive wrong.

O lyric love half angel and half bird And all a wonder and a wild desire.

Youth means love, Vows can’t change nature, priests are only men.

‘Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot By Wise man.’

Well, British Public, ye who like me not, (God love you!).

There’s more hateful form of foolery— The social sage’s, Solomon of saloons And philosophic diner-out.

We loved, sir—used to meet: How sad and bad and mad it was— But then, how it was sweet !

Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first, Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

And it is good to cheat the pair, and gibe, Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech. Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon. Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars; the stars came otherwise.

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.