Joaquin Miller - Man Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

View all Joaquin Miller Quotes
Man's books are but man's alphabet,
Beyond and on his lessons lie — The lessons of the violet,
The large gold letters of the sky; The love of beauty, blossomed soil, The large content, the tranquil toil: The toil that nature ever taught,
The patient toil, the constant stir,
The toil of seas where shores are wrought,
The toil of Christ, the carpenter;
The toil of God incessantly
By palm-set land or frozen sea.

Joaquin Miller
For the Right, through thickest night,
Till the man-brute Wrong be driven
From high places; till the Right
Shall lift like some grand beacon light.
For the Right! Love, Right and duty;
Lift the world up, though you fall
Heaped with dead before the wall;
God can find a soul of beauty
Where it falls, as gems of worth
Are found by miners dark in earth.

Joaquin Miller
He rode as rides the hurricane;
He seem'd to swallow up the plain;
He rode as never man did ride,
He rode, for ghosts rode at his side,
And on his right a grizzled grim —
No, no, this tale is not of him.

Joaquin Miller
Behold this sea, that sapphire sky!
Where nature does so much for man,
Shall man not set his standard high,
And hold some higher, holier plan?
Some loftier plan than ever planned
By outworn book of outworn land? Where God has done so much for man,
Shall man for God do aught at all?
The soul that feeds on books alone —
I count that soul exceeding small
That lives alone by book and creed,—
A soul that has not learned to read.

Joaquin Miller
Who now shall accuse and arraign us?
What man shall condemn and disown?
Since Christ has said only the stainless
Shall cast at his fellows a stone.

Joaquin Miller
O star-built bridge, broad milky way!
O star-lit, stately, splendid span!
If but one star should cease to stay
And prop its shoulders to God's plan —
The man who lives for self, I say,
He lives for neither God nor man.

Joaquin Miller
Each gives to each, and like the star
Gets back its gift in tenfold pay. To get and give and give amain
The rivers run and oceans roll.
O generous and high-born rain
When reigning as a splendid whole!
That man who lives for self alone
Lives for the meanest mortal known.

Joaquin Miller
Oh, great is the hero who wins a name,
But greater many and many a time
Some pale-faced fellow who dies in shame,
And lets God finish the thought sublime. And great is the man with a sword undrawn,
And good is the man who refrains from wine;
But the man who fails and yet still fights on,
Lo, he is the twin-born brother of mine.

Joaquin Miller
Man's books are but a climbing stair,
Lain step by step, like stairs of stone;
The stairway here, the temple there —
Man's lampad honor, and his trust,
The God who called him from the dust.

Joaquin Miller