Dante Gabriel Rossetti Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.
'I am thyself,—what hast thou done to me?'
'And I—and I—thyself,' (lo! each one saith,)
'And thou thyself to all eternity!'

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Think thou and act; tomorrow thou shalt die
Outstretch'd in the sun's warmth upon the shore,
Thou say'st: "Man's measur'd path is all gone o'er:
Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,
Man clomb until he touch'd the truth; and I,
Even I, am he whom it was destin'd for."
How should this be? Art thou then so much more
Than they who sow'd, that thou shouldst reap thereby?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
If God in his wisdom have brought close
The day when I must die,
That day by water or fire or air
My feet shall fall in the destined snare
Wherever my road may lie.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
'I saw the Sibyl at Cumae'
(One said) 'with mine own eye.
She hung in a cage, and read her rune
To all the passers-by.
Said the boys, What wouldst thou, Sibyl?
She answered, I would die. '

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
You have been mine before - How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow's soar, your neck turned so, Some veil did fall, - I knew it all of yore.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Sometimes thou seem'st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Even as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space
When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car
Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,—
So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace
When the drear soul desires thee.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A Sonnet is a moment's monument,—
Memorial from the Soul's eternity
To one dead deathless hour.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Tell me now in what hidden way is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
Only heard on river and mere—
She whose beauty was more than human?—
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti