British Poet Quotes

Like beauteous flowers which vainly waste their scent
Of odours in unhaunted deserts.

William Chamberlayne

With that malignant envy which turns pale, And sickens, even if a friend prevail.

Charles Churchill

When we are conscious of the least comparative merit in ourselves, we should take as much care to conceal the value we set upon it, as if it were a real defect; to be elated or vain upon it is showing your money before people in want.

Grief, I have cursed thee often — now at last
To hate thy name I am no longer free;
Caught in thy bony arms and prisoned fast,
I love no love but thee.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

There are so many kinds of awful men One can't avoid them all. She often said She'd never make the same mistake again: She always made a new mistake instead.

It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader's ear to hear anything of praise from him.

Hark! She is called, the parting hour is come. Take thy farewell, poor world! Heaven must go home....

Richard Crashaw

Every incarnation that we remember must increase our comprehension of ourselves as who we are.

Aleister Crowley

Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove, Far from the clamorous world; doth live his own; Though solitary, who is not alone, But doth converse with that eternal love.

William Drummond of Hawthornden

The words you spoke were frenzied prayers to chemistry..

Carol Ann Duffy

Now Albert had heard about lions,
How they was ferocious and wild;
And to see Wallace lying so peaceful,
Just didn't seem right to the child.

So straightway the brave little feller,
Not showing a morsel of fear,
Took his stick with the 'orses 'ead 'andle,
And shoved it in Wallace's ear.

So some unlucky Engineer Does all the fit Materials compound, That are in Art or Nature found; Will glorious Fire-Works prepare.

I saw the radiant Queen of Night
Walking in brightness through the sky...

Charlotte Elliott

High in his chariot glow'd the lamp of day.

William Falconer

If they don't depend on true evidence, scientists are no better than gossips.

Penelope Fitzgerald

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, We Poets of the proud old lineage Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.

James Elroy Flecker

I think mice
Are rather nice.

Their tails are long,
Their faces small,
They haven't any
Chins at all.

The spiritual element, the really important part of religion, has no concern with Time and Space, temporary mundane laws, or conduct.

Richard Le Gallienne

Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal, followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns. The wind was the furious voice of this sluggish animal light that was baring the dormers and mullions and scullions of Cold Comfort Farm.

Or to some coffee-house I stray
For news, the manna of a day.

Its blasphemy enabled man to break free from the Bible and Koran with their life-denying fundamentalists and hell fire such fanatics love to fan.

Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

Frances Ridley Havergal

And have they fixed the where and when?
And shall Trelawney die?
Here's twenty thousand Cornish men
Shall know the reason why!

Pig sit still in the strainer
I must have my Pig tea

Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned by skeleton crews