Joaquin Miller Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

A thousand miles of mighty wood
Where thunder-storms stride fire-shod;
A thousand flowers every rod,
A stately tree on every rood;
Ten thousand leaves on every tree,
And each a miracle to me;
And yet there be men who question God!

Joaquin Miller
Where storm-born shadows hide and hunt
I knew thee, in thy glorious youth,
And loved thy vast face, white as truth;
I stood where thunderbolts were wont
To smite thy Titan-fashioned front,
And heard dark mountains rock and roll;
I saw the lightning's gleaming rod
Reach forth and write on heaven's scroll
The awful autograph of God!

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
I count the columned waves at war
With Titan elements; and they,
In martial splendor, storm the bar
And shake the world, these bits of spray.

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
Lo! all things moving must go by.
The sea lies dead. Behold, this land
Sits desolate in dust beside
His snow-white, seamless shroud of sand;
The very clouds have wept and died,
And only God is in the sky.

Joaquin Miller
The mountains from that fearful first
Named day were God's own house. Behold,
'Twas here dread Sinai's thunders burst
And showed His face. 'Twas here of old
His prophets dwelt. Lo, it was here
The Christ did come when death drew near.

Joaquin Miller
A grand old Neptune in the prow,
Gray-hair'd, and white with touch of time,
Yet strong as in his middle prime;
A grizzled king, I see him now,
With beard as blown by wind of seas,
And wild and white as white sea-storm,
Stand up, turn suddenly, look back
Along the low boat's wrinkled track,
Then fold his mantle round a form
Broad-built as any Hercules,
And so sit silently.

Joaquin Miller
These stony altars they have hurled
Oppression back, have kept the boon
Of liberty. Behold, how free
The mountains stand, and eternally.

Joaquin Miller
A face that lifted up; sweet face
That was so like a life begun,
That rose for me a rising sun
Above the bended seven hills
Of dead and risen old new Rome. Not that I deem'd she loved me. Nay,
I dared not even dream of that.
I only say I knew her; say
She ever sat before me, sat
All still and voiceless as love is,
And ever look'd so fair, divine,
Her hush'd, vehement soul fill'd mine,
And overflowed with Runic bliss,
And made itself a part of this.

Joaquin Miller
Come listen, O Love, to the voice of the dove,
Come, hearken and hear him say,
THERE ARE MANY TO-MORROWS, MY LOVE, MY LOVE, —
THERE IS ONLY ONE TO-DAY.

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
Her mouth
Was roses gather'd from the south,
The warm south side of Paradise,
And breathed upon and handed down,
By angels on a stair of stars.

Joaquin Miller
"All honor to him who shall win the prize,"
The world has cried for a thousand years;
But to him who tries, and who fails and dies,
I give great honor and glory and tears. Give glory and honor and pitiful tears
To all who fail in their deeds sublime;
Their ghosts are many in the van of years,
They were born with Time in advance of Time.

Joaquin Miller
Dear, I took these trackless masses
Fresh from Him who fashioned them;
Wrought in rock, and hewed fair passes,
Flower set, as sets a gem. Aye, I built in woe. God willed it;
Woe that passeth ghosts of guilt.
Yet I built as His birds builded —
Builded singing as I built. All is finished! Roads of flowers
Wait your loyal little feet.
All completed? Nay, the hours
Till you come are incomplete.

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
All you can hold in your cold dead hand is what you have given away.

Joaquin Miller
Knowledge is
Bought only with a weary care,
And wisdom means a world of pain.

Joaquin Miller
Fame lulls the fever of the soul, and makes Us feel that we have grasp'd an immortality.

Joaquin Miller
God's poet is silence! His song is unspoken, And yet so profound, so loud, and so far, It fills you, it thrills you with measures unbroken, And as soft, and as fair, and as far as a star.

Joaquin Miller
The bravest battle that ever was fought; Shall I tell you where and when? On the maps of the world you will find it not; It was fought by the mothers of men.

Joaquin Miller
I throw a kiss across the sea, I drink the winds as drinking wine, And dream they all are blown from thee, I catch the whisper'd kiss of thine.

Joaquin Miller
He gained a world; he gave that world Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!"

Joaquin Miller
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
The sunlight of a sunlit land,
A land of fruit, of flowers, and
A land of love and calm delight;
A land where night is not like night,
And noon is but a name for rest,
And love for love is reckoned best. Where conversations of the eyes
Are all enough; where beauty thrills
The heart like hues of harvest-home;
Where rage lies down, where passion dies,
Where peace hath her abiding place....

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
O you had loved her sitting there,
Half hidden in her loosen'd hair:
Why, you had loved her for her eyes,
Their large and melancholy look
Of tenderness, and well mistook
Their love for light of Paradise.

Joaquin Miller
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas.

Joaquin Miller
Rugged! Rugged as Parnassus!
Rude, as all roads I have trod —
Yet are steeps and stone-strown passes
Smooth o'er head, and nearest God. Here black thunders of my canyon
Shake its walls in Titan wars!
Here white sea-born clouds companion
With such peaks as know the stars!

Joaquin Miller
I only saw her as she pass'd —
A great, sad beauty, in whose eyes
Lay all the loves of Paradise....
You shall not know her — she who sat
Unconscious in my heart all time
I dream'd and wove this wayward rhyme,
And loved and did not blush thereat.

Joaquin Miller