Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Life Quotes

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! —and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?
Who's sorry for a gnat.. or girl?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I take it for pure magic, this life of mine. Surely nobody was ever so happy before.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleasure in life!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We overstate the ills of life, and take Imagination... down our earth to rake...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
A woman cannot do the thing she ought, which means whatever perfect thing she can, in life, in art, in science, but she fears to let the perfect action take her part and rest there: she must prove what she can do before she does it, -- prate of woman's rights, of woman's mission, woman's function, till the men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry, A woman's function plainly is... to talk. Poor souls, they are very reasonably vexed!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away —
And yet my days go on, go on.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And I said in underbreath —
All our life is mixed with death, —
And who knoweth which is best?
And I smiled to think God's greatness
Flowed around our incompleteness, —
Round our restlessness, His rest.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What we call Life is a condition of the soul. And the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault. These tears in our eyes, these faintings of the flesh, will not hinder such improvement.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Life, struck sharp on death,
Makes awful lightning. His last word was, 'Love–'
'Love, my child, love, love!'–(then he had done with grief)
'Love, my child.' Ere I answered he was gone,
And none was left to love in all the world.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write — it is life, for me.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I praise Thee while my days go on;
I love Thee while my days go on:
Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost,
With emptied arms and treasure lost,
I thank Thee while my days go on. And having in thy life-depth thrown
Being and suffering (which are one),
As a child drops his pebble small
Down some deep well, and hears it fall
Smiling — so I. THY DAYS GO ON.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
You were made perfectly to be loved - and surely I have loved you, in the idea of you, my whole life long.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Instruct me how to thank thee! Oh, to shoot
My soul's full meaning into future years,
That they should lend it utterance, and salute
Love that endures, from life that disappears!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
What is art,
But life upon the larger scale, the higher.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Whoever lives true life will love true love.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
That he, in his developed manhood, stood
A little sunburnt by the glare of life;
While I.. it seemed no sun had shone on me.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I seek no copy now of life's first half:
Leave here the pages with long musing curled,
And write me new my future's epigraph,
New angel mine, unhoped for in the world!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Knowledge by suffering entereth,
And life is perfected by death.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe,—but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning