Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Life Quotes

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

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
Death is the chillness that precedes the dawn; We shudder for a moment, then awake In the broad sunshine of the other life.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Oh, There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love - the first fluttering of its silken wings - the first rising sound and breath of that wind which is so soon to sweep through the soul, to purify or to destroy.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And see! she stirs!
She starts,—she moves,—she seems to feel
The thrill of life along her keel,
And, spurning with her foot the ground,
With one exulting, joyous bound,
She leaps into the ocean's arms!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
O ye dead Poets, who are living still Immortal in your verse, though life be fled, And ye, O living Poets, who are dead Though ye are living, if neglect can kill, Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill, With drops of anguish falling fast and red From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head, Ye were not glad your errand to fulfill?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Love is sunshine, hate is shadow,
Life is checkered shade and sunshine.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the life of every man there are sudden transitions of feeling, which seem almost miraculous. At once, as if some magician had touched the heavens and the earth, the dark clouds melt into the air, the wind falls, and serenity succeeds the storm. The causes which produce these changes may have been long at work within us, but the changes themselves are instantaneous, and apparently without sufficient cause.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When we reflect that all the aspects of Nature, all the emotions of the soul, and all the events of life, have been the subjects of poetry for hundreds and thousands of years, we can hardly wonder that there should be so many resemblances and coincidences of expression among poets, but rather that they are not more numerous and more striking.

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
Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
For it is the fate of a woman Long to be patient and silent, to wait like a ghost that is speechless, Till some questioning voice dissolves the spell of its silence. Hence is the inner life of so many suffering women Sunless and silent and deep, like subterranean rivers Runnng through caverns of darkness...

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
To say the least, a town life makes one more tolerant and liberal in one's judgment of others.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
O thou child of many prayers!
Life hath quicksands; life hath snares!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We waste our best years in distilling the sweetest flowers of life into potions which, after all, do not immortalize, but only intoxicate.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The shadows of the mind are like those of the body. In the morning of life they all lie behind us; at noon we trample them under foot; and in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What is time? The shadow on the dial, the striking of the clock, the running of the sand, day and night, summer and winter, months, years, centuries-these are but arbitrary and outward signs, the measure of Time, not Time itself. Time is the Life of the Soul.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sculpture is more than painting. It is greater To raise the dead to life than to create Phantoms that seem to live.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The word May is a perfumed word. It is an illuminated initial. It means youth, love, song, and all that is beautiful in life.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How can I teach your children gentleness and mercy to the weak, and reverence for life, which in its nakedness and excess, is still a gleam of God's omnipotence, when by your laws, your actions and your speech, you contradict the very things I teach?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The course of my long life hath reached at last in fragile bark over a tempestuous sea the common harbor, where must rendered be account for all the actions of the past.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow