Emma Lazarus Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus
Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.

Emma Lazarus
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate...

Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles.

Emma Lazarus
The soul, at peace, reflects the peace without, Forgetting grief as sunset skies forget The morning's transient shower.

Emma Lazarus
When angels visit earth, the messengers Of God's decree, they come as lightning, wind: Before the throne, they all are living fire.

Emma Lazarus
The little and the great are joined in one By God's great force. The wondrous golden sun Is linked unto the glow-worm's tiny spark; The eagle soars to heaven in his flight; And in those realms of space, all bathed in light, Soar none except the eagle and the lark.

Emma Lazarus
There is no comfort looking forth nor back, The present gives the lie to all her past.

Emma Lazarus
A lady 'twixt two knights' stone effigies,
And every day in dusky glory steeps
Their sculptured slumber of five centuries.

Emma Lazarus
Still ours the dance, the feast, the glorious Psalm, The mystic lights of emblem, and the Word.

Emma Lazarus
Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread
Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!

Emma Lazarus
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.

Emma Lazarus
The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
We know not which is sadder to recall.

Emma Lazarus
Kindle the taper like the steadfast star
Ablaze on evening's forehead o'er the earth,
And add each night a lustre till afar
An eightfold splendor shine above thy hearth.

Emma Lazarus
No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define — what is a bird.

Emma Lazarus
Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, —
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

Emma Lazarus
His cup is gall, his meat is tears,
His passion lasts a thousand years.

Emma Lazarus
No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead.

Emma Lazarus
Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre
From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows
Drew trembling music.

Emma Lazarus
The Jewish problem is as old as history, and assumes in each age a new form. The life or death of millions of human beings hangs upon its solution; its agitation revives the fiercest passions for good and for evil that inflame the human breast.

Emma Lazarus
I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.

Emma Lazarus
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford.

Emma Lazarus
Sweet empty sky of June without a stain,
Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills
Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain,
That each dark copse and hollow overfills

Emma Lazarus