Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

488 Sourced Quotes

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Talk not of wasted affection, affection never was wasted;
If it enrich not the heart of another, its waters, returning
Back to their springs, like the rain, shall fill them full of refreshment;
That which the fountain sends forth returns again to the fountain.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and oftentimes we call a man cold, when he is only sad.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The heaven of poetry and romance still lies around us and within us.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Nile, forever new and old, Among the living and the dead, Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Where should the scholar live? In solitude, or in society? in the green stillness of the country, where he can hear the heart of Nature beat, or in the dark, gray town where he can hear and feel the throbbing heart of man?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
In schools, some graduate of the field or street,
Who shall become a master of art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought
Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
For lands not yet laid down in any chart.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
This song of mine
Is a song of the vine
To be sung by the glowing embers
Of wayside inns,
When the rain begins
To darken the drear Novembers. and
For the richest and best
Is the wind of the West
That grows by the Beautiful River;
Whose sweet perfume
Fills all the room
With a bension on the giver. and
When you ask one friend to dine,
Give hime your best wine!
When you ask two,
The second best will do.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Southward with fleet of ice Sailed the corsair Death; Wild and fast blew the blast, And the east-wind was his breath.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Fame grows like a tree if it have the principle of growth in it; the accumulated dews of ages freshen its leaves.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The sunshine fails, the shadows grow more dreary,
And I am near to fall, infirm and weary.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The star of the unconquered will, He rises in my breast, Serene, and resolute, and still, And calm, and self-possessed.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Nature with folded hand seemed there, Kneeling at her evening prayer!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Our ingress into the world Was naked and bare; Our progress through the world Is trouble and care.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close, Only the empty nests are left behind, And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
See yonder fire! It is the moon slow rising o'er the eastern hill. It glimmers on the forest tips, and through the dewy foliage drips In little rivulets of light, and makes the heart in love with night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A stiff letter galls one like a stiff shirt collar -- whilst a sheet garnished here and there with a careless blot -- and here and there a dash -- but in the main full of excellent matter, is like a clever fellow in a dirty shirt whom we value for the good humour he brings with him and not for the garb he wears.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
After a day of cloud and wind and rain Sometimes the setting sun breaks out again, And touching all the darksome woods with light, Smiles on the fields until they laugh and sing, Then like a ruby from the horizon's ring, Drops down into the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I hear the Scales, where hang in equipoise The night and day.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Now the zephyrs diminish the cold, and the year being ended, Winter Maeotian seems longer than ever before; And the Ram that bore unsafely the burden of Helle, Now makes the hours of the day equal with those of the night.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The things that have been and shall be no more, The things that are, and that hereafter shall be, The things that might have been, and yet were not, The fading twilight of joys departed.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Like black hulks the shadows of the great trees ride at anchor on the billowy sea of grass.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow