English Poet Quotes

Most of life's problems can be solved
By running fast and kicking something.

U. A. Fanthorpe

Real misery delights not in reproaches and complaints. It is like charity and love - silent, long suffering and mild.

Lady Caroline Lamb

The first slap-jack given me for dinner was a cake of flour, partially fried in a pan of fat bacon. I nibbled about the brown edges and threw it, unbaked, against a barn door, where it stuck for days.

Fair summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore: So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay. Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.

Dear Lord! while we adoring pay
Our humble thanks to Thee,
May every heart with rapture say,—
"The Saviour died for me!"

Love, a child, is ever crying:
Please him and he straight is flying,
Give him, he the more is craving,
Never satisfied with having.

Lady Mary Wroth

E'er time and place were, time and place were not, When Primitive Nothing something straight begot, Then all proceeded from the great united — What.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

If ever I ate a good supper at night,
I dreamed of the devil, and waked in a fright.

Christopher Anstey

The doctor lives by chicken pox, by measles, and by mumps. He keeps a microbe in a box and cheers him when he jumps.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine.

With leaden foot time creeps along
While Delia is away.

First, a poem must be magical, then musical as a sea-gull and it must hold fire as well.

Jose Garcia Villa

Such, Polly, are your sex - part truth, part fiction; - Some thought, much whim and all a contradiction.

Ask me no more, where those stars light,
That downwards fall in dead of night;
For in your eyes they sit, and there
Fixed become, as in their sphere.

'Qui procul hinc', the legend's writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

A sweet attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of Gospel books;
I trow that countenance cannot lie,
Whose thoughts are legible in the eye.

And one false step entirely damns her fame.
In vain with tears the loss she may deplore,
In vain look back on what she was before;
She sets like stars that fall, to rise no more.

If there is any truth to my parenting the dreamwork movement, it comes from the power of the press.

Companion none is like Unto the mind alone;
For many have been harmed by speech,
Through thinking, few or none.

Thomas, Lord Vaux

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God's Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on Earth.

Dorothy Frances Gurney

Darkness, thou first great parent of us all,
Thou art our great original!

And an ingenious Spaniard says, that "rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate and fools to pass by without consideration."

Al the povere peple tho pescoddes fetten; Benes and baken apples thei broghte in hir lappe, Chibolles and chervelles and ripe chiries manye, And profrede Piers this present to plese with Hunger.

William Langland

Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee.

I first saw the light on the 5th of August, 1860, I was born in Lee Street, Wharf Street, Leicester. The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant's feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity.