Robert Browning - Life Quotes

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Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

Robert Browning
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!

Robert Browning
The ultimate, angels' law,
Indulging every instinct of the soul
There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!

Robert Browning
For thence a paradox Which comforts while it mocks, - Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

Robert Browning
All we have gained then by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt: We called the chess-board white-we call it black.

Robert Browning
Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,—been happy.

Robert Browning
A man can have but one life and one death,
One heaven, one hell.

Robert Browning
How good is man's life, the mere living!
How fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses
Forever in joy!

Robert Browning
Paracelsus At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages' way, And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance I perished in an arrogant self-reliance Ages ago; and in that act a prayer For one more chance went up so earnest, so Instinct with better light let in by death, That life was blotted out — not so completely But scattered wrecks enough of it remain, Dim memories, as now, when once more seems The goal in sight again.

Robert Browning
A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one;
And those who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all.

Robert Browning
God smiles as He has always smiled;
Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
Ere stars were thundergirt, or piled
The Heavens, God thought on me His child;
Ordained a life for me, arrayed
Its circumstances, every one
To the minutest; ay, God said
This head this hand should rest upon
Thus, ere He fashioned star or sun.

Robert Browning
Say not "a small event!" Why "small"?
Costs it more pain that this ye call
A "great event" should come to pass
From that? Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!

Robert Browning
We mortals cross the ocean of this world Each in his average cabin of a life; The bests not big, the worst yields elbowroom.

Robert Browning
Oh child that didst despise thy life so much
When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,
How the fine ear felt fall the first low word
"Value life, and preserve life for My sake!"

Robert Browning
A book in shape but, really, pure crude fact
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since.
Give it me back! The thing's restorative
I'the touch and sight.

Robert Browning
He looked at her, as a lover can;
She looked at him, as one who awakes:
The past was a sleep, and her life began.

Robert Browning
…I feel for the common chord again…
The C Major of this life.

Robert Browning
But how carve way i' the life that lies before,
If bent on groaning ever for the past?

Robert Browning
Hand
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship,
And great hearts expand
And grow one in the sense of this world's life.

Robert Browning
I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on.

Robert Browning
Out of your whole life give but a moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it, -so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense.

Robert Browning
Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I save and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again.

Robert Browning
One and all
We lend an ear-nay, Science takes thereto-
Encourages the meanest who has racked
Nature until he gains from her some fact,
To state what truth is from his point of view,
Mere pin-point though it be: since many such
Conduce to make a whole, she bids our friend
Come forward unabashed and haply lend
His little life-experience to our much
Of modern knowledge.

Robert Browning
Death was past, life not come: so he waited.

Robert Browning
How he lies in his rights of a man!
Death has done all death can.
And absorbed in the new life he leads,
He recks not, he heeds
Nor his wrong nor my vengeance; both strike
On his senses alike,
And are lost in the solemn and strange
Surprise of the change.

Robert Browning
At last awake from life, that insane dream we take for waking now.

Robert Browning
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!

Robert Browning
Fair or foul the lot apportioned life on earth, we bear alike.

Robert Browning
Progress is
The law of life: man is not Man as yet.

Robert Browning
For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,—
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is.

Robert Browning