Famous Quotes

Quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
• All things must change to something new, to something strange.
• Each morning sees some task begun, each evening sees it close Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose.
• Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
• For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
• For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art.
• Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.
• However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.
• 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.
• Intelligence and courtesy not always are combined Often in a wooden house a golden room we find.
• It is difficult to know at what moment love begins it is less difficult to know that it has begun.
• It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.
• Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.
• 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.
• Men of genius are often dull and inert in society as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
• 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.
• Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.
• Music is the universal language of mankind.
• People demand freedom only when they have no power.
• 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.
• Resolve and thou art free.
• Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
• The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain.
• The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.
• The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.
• The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.
• The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.
• The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do without thought of fame. If it comes at all it will come because it is deserved, not because it is sought after.
• There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.
• There is no grief like the grief that does not speak.
• Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.
• Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.
• When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.
• Whenever nature leaves a hole in a person's mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.