Algernon Charles Swinburne Quotes

125 Sourced Quotes

God by God flits past in thunder, till His glories turn to shades;
God to God bears wondering witness how His gospel flames and fades.
More was each of these, yet they were, than man their servant seemed:
Dead are all of these, and man survives who made them while he dreamed.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Friends, citizens, and brethren. This our friend
Hath given you by my charge to know of me
Thus much, that if your ends and mine be one,
As one our wrongs are, and this people's need
One, toward the goal forefelt of our desire
No heart shall beat, no foot shall press, no hand
Strain, strive, and strike with steadier will than mine
And faith more strenuous toward the purpose. This
If ye believe not, here our hope hath end;
If ye believe, here under happier stars
Begins the date of Venice.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
A blatant Bassarid of Boston, a rampant Maenad of Massachusetts.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
To have known love, how bitter a thing it is.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Maiden, and mistress of the months and stars
Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
They do not ill, being lords of ours, to slay
Me; nay, they could not spare: but thee to slay,
To spill thy strong young life for truth to me,
In all men's eyes would mark them monstrous : thou
Must live, and serve my slayers, and serving them
Sustain my memory by the proof — if God
Shall give thee grace to prove it — that thy name,
Thy father's name and mine, in true men's ears
Rings truth, and means not treason.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ask nothing more of me sweet; All I can give you I give; Heart of my heart were it more, More would be laid at your feet..

Algernon Charles Swinburne
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
But now, you are twain, you are cloven apart Flesh of his flesh, but heart of my heart.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
The loves and hours of the life of a man,
They are swift and sad, being born of the sea.
Hours that rejoice and regret for a span,
Born with a man's breath, mortal as he;
Loves that are lost ere they come to birth,
Weeds of the wave, without fruit upon earth.
I lose what I long for, save what I can,
My love, my love, and no love for me!

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Fear that makes faith may break faith; and a fool Is but in folly stable.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,
Thou art noble and nude and antique.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
To wipe off the froth of falsehood from the foaming lips of inebriated virtue, when fresh from the sexless orgies of morality and reeling from the delirious riot of religion, may doubtless be a charitable office.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
God, whom we see not, is: and God, who is not, we see: Fiddle, we know, is diddle: and diddle, we take it, is dee.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Cold autumn, wan with wrath of wind and rain,
Saw pass a soul sweet as the sovereign tune
That death smote silent when he smote again.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Who knows but on their sleep may rise Such light as never heaven let through To lighten earth from Paradise?

Algernon Charles Swinburne
No blast of air or fire of sun Puts out the light whereby we run With girdled loins our lamplit race, And each from each takes heart of grace And spirit till his turn be done.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
On the mountains of memory by the world's wellsprings, in all man's eyes, where the light of life of him is on all past things, death only dies.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
A little soul scarce fledged for earth Takes wing with heaven again for goal, Even while we hailed as fresh from birth A little soul.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;Thou art fed with perpetual breath, and alive after infinite changes,And fresh from the kisses of death,Of langours rekindled and rallied, Of barren delights and unclean,Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallidAnd poisonous queen.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
For whom all winds are quiet as the sun,/ All waters as the shore.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
There lived a singer in France of old By the tideless dolorous midland sea. In a land of sand and rain and gold There shone one woman, and none but she.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
A little marsh-plant, yellow green And pricked at lip with a tender red, Tread close, and wither way you tread, Some faint black water jets between Least you should bruise the curious head.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
In fierce March weather White waves break tether, And whirled together At either hand, Like weeds uplifted, The tree-trunks rifted In spars are drifted, Like foam or sand.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Time turns the old days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Sorrow, on wing through the world for ever, Here and there for awhile would borrow Rest, if rest might haply deliver Sorrow...

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Doubt Is Faith In The Main: but faith, on the whole, is doubt;
We Cannot Believe By Proof: but could we believe without?

Algernon Charles Swinburne