Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

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God's voice was not in the earthquake, Not in the fire, nor the storm, but it was in the whispering breezes.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How in the turmoil of life can love stand,
Where there is not one heart, and one mouth and one hand.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail. And crying havoc on the slug and snail.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dreams or illusions, call them what you will, they lift us from the commonplace of life to better things.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The sparrows chirped as if they still were proud Their race in Holy Writ should mentioned be.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Shepherds at the grange, Where the Babe was born, Sang with many a change, Christmas carols until morn.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives,
Where little else than life itself survives.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Down sank the great red sun, and in golden glimmering vapours Veiled the light of his face, like the Prophet descending from Sinai.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The bells themselves are the best of preachers, Their brazen lips are learned teachers, From their pulpits of stone, in the upper air, Sounding aloft, without crack or flaw, Shriller than trumpets under the Law, Now a sermon and now a prayer.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
By unseen hands uplifted in the light Of sunset, yonder solitary cloud Floats, with its white apparel blown abroad, And wafted up to heaven.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Labor with what zeal we will, Something still remains undone, Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
You call them thieves and pillagers; but know, They are the winged wardens of yours farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvests keep a hundred harms...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
But the good deed, through the ages Living in historic pages, Brighter grows and gleams immortal, Unconsumed by moth or rust.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The low desire, the base design
That makes another's virtues less.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
No action, whether foul or fair, Is ever done, but it leaves somewhere A record, written by fingers ghostly, As a blessing or a curse, and mostly In the greater weakness or greater strength Of the acts which follow it.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Softly the evening came. The sun from the western horizon Like a magician extended his golden want o'er the landscape; Trinkling vapors arose; and sky and water and forest Seemed all on fire at the touch, and melted and mingled together.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The twilight is sad and cloudy, The wind blows wild and free, And like the wings of sea-birds Flash the white caps of the sea.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Torrent of light and river of air,
Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen,
Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Work is my recreation,
The play of faculty; a delight like that
Which a bird feels in flying, or a fish
In darting through the water,--Nothing more.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Every man is in some sort a failure to himself. No one ever reaches the heights to which he aspires.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And the wind plays on those great sonorous harps, the shrouds and masts of ships.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Time rides with the old
At a great pace. As travellers on swift steeds
See the near landscape fly and flow behind them,
While the remoter fields and dim horizons
Go with them, and seem wheeling round to meet them,
So in old age things near us slip away,
And distant things go with us.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Centaur, Sagittarius, am I, Born of Ixion and the cloud's embrace: With sounding hoofs across the earth I fly, A steed Thessalian with a human face.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Even He that died for us upon the cross, in the last hour, in the unutterable agony of death, was mindful of His mother, as if to teach us that this holy love should be our last worldly thought - the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I saw the long line of the vacant shore, The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand, And the brown rocks left bare on every hand, As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Burn, O evening hearth, and waken Pleasant visions, as of old! Though the house by winds be shaken, Safe I keep this room of gold!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Universe as an immeasurable wheel Turning for evermore In the rapid and rushing river of Time.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
At first laying down, as a fact fundamental, That nothing with God can be accidental.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is folly to pretend that one ever wholly recovers from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar. There are faces I can never look upon without emotion, there are names I can never hear spoken without almost starting.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow