Edgar Lee Masters Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

Those who first oppose a good work, seize it and make it their own, when the cornerstone is laid and memorial tablets are erected.

Edgar Lee Masters
Immortality is not a gift,
Immortality is an achievement;
And only those who strive mightily
Shall possess it.

Edgar Lee Masters
How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?

Edgar Lee Masters
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

Edgar Lee Masters
I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea.
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence for which music alone finds the word.

Edgar Lee Masters
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?

Edgar Lee Masters
Blind as I was, I tried to get out
As the carriage fell in the ditch,
And was caught in the wheels and killed.

Edgar Lee Masters
To this generation I would say: Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

Edgar Lee Masters
To love is to find your own soul Through the soul of the beloved one.

Edgar Lee Masters
The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.

Edgar Lee Masters
The mind sees the world as a thing apart, And the soul makes the world at one with itself. A mirror scratched reflects no image— And this is the silence of wisdom.

Edgar Lee Masters
Hear me, ambitious souls,
Sex is the curse of life!

Edgar Lee Masters
Why, a moral truth is a hollow tooth Which must be propped with gold.

Edgar Lee Masters
A giant as we hoped, in truth, a dwarf; A barrel of slop that shines on Lethe's wharf', Which at first seemed a vessel with sweet wine For thirsty lips. So down the swift decline You went through sloven spirit, craven heart And cynic indolence. And here the art Of molding clay has caught you for the nonce And made your shame our shame ~ Your head in bronze!

Edgar Lee Masters
The dust's for crawling, heaven's for flying, Wherefore, O Soul, whose wings are grown, Soar upward to the sun!

Edgar Lee Masters
Did I follow Truth wherever she led, And stand against the whole world for a cause, And uphold the weak against the strong? If I did I would be remembered among men...

Edgar Lee Masters
The soul of the river had entered my soul, And the gathered power of my soul was moving So swiftly, it seemed to be at rest Under cities of cloud and under Spheres of silver and changing worlds Until I saw a flash of trumpets Above the battlements over Time!

Edgar Lee Masters
The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.
And if the people find you can fiddle,
Why, fiddle you must, for all your life.

Edgar Lee Masters
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

Edgar Lee Masters
In time you shall see Fate approach you
In the shape of your own image in the mirror;
Or you shall sit alone by your own hearth,
And suddenly the chair by you shall hold a guest,
And you shall know that guest,
And read the authentic message of his eyes.

Edgar Lee Masters
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln.

Edgar Lee Masters
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love life.

Edgar Lee Masters
Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music.

Edgar Lee Masters
There is the silence of age, too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it in words intelligible to those who have not lived the great range of life.

Edgar Lee Masters
And when you are poor and have to carry
The Christian creed and wife and children
All on your back, it is too much!
That's why I made the Elixir of Youth,
Which landed me in the jail at Peoria
Branded a swindler and a crook
By the upright Federal Judge!

Edgar Lee Masters
Go by reverently, and read with sober care
How a great people, riding with defiant shouts
The centaur of Revolution,
Spurred and whipped to frenzy,
Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea
Over the precipice they were nearing,
And fell from his back in precipitate awe
To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.

Edgar Lee Masters
Such phantom blossoms palely shining
Over the lifeless boughs of Time.

Edgar Lee Masters
The much-sought prize of eternal youth Is just arrested growth.

Edgar Lee Masters
You may think, passer-by, that Fate
Is a pit-fall outside of yourself,
Around which you may walk by the use of foresight
And wisdom.

Edgar Lee Masters
I never started to plow in my life
That some one did not stop in the road
And take me away to a dance or picnic.
I ended up with forty acres;
I ended up with a broken fiddle —
And a broken laugh, and a thousand memories,
And not a single regret.

Edgar Lee Masters