Robert Browning - Man Quotes

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Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

Robert Browning
Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!
Not for such hopes and fears
Annulling youth's brief years,
Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!
Rather I prize the doubt
Low kinds exist without,
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.
Poor vaunt of life indeed,
Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast;
Such feasting ended, then
As sure an end to men.

Robert Browning
When a man's busy, why leisure Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: 'Faith, and at leisure once is he? Straightway he wants to be busy.

Robert Browning
Stand still, true poet that you are! I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you'll fail us: when afar You rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star!

Robert Browning
Sorrow, the heart must bear,
Sits in the home of each, conspicuous there.
Many a circumstance, at least,
Touches the very breast.
For those
Whom any sent away,--he knows:
And in the live man's stead,
Armor and ashes reach
The house of each.

Robert Browning
He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!
Man has Forever.'

Robert Browning
Rejoice that man is hurled, From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled!

Robert Browning
Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts': God is, they are;
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.

Robert Browning
'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!

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

Robert Browning
That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,—
His hundred's soon hit;
This high man, aiming at a million,
Misses an unit.
That has the world here—should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!
This throws himself on God, and unperplexed
Seeking shall find him.

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
There's a new tribunal now higher than God's -The educated man's!

Robert Browning
What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

Robert Browning
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount:
Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

Robert Browning
Just my vengeance complete,
The man sprang to his feet,
Stood erect, caught at God's skirts, and prayed!
So, I was afraid!

Robert Browning
For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man's loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.

Robert Browning
There is no truer truth obtainable
By Man than comes of music.

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
That's all we may expect of man, this side The grave: his good is—knowing he is bad.

Robert Browning
O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire, —
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face, —
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory — to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!

Robert Browning
Why comes temptation, but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestaled in triumph?

Robert Browning
When the fight begins within himself,
A man 's worth something.

Robert Browning
Tis Man's to explore up and down, inch by inch, with the taper his reason.

Robert Browning
What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up,
And be discharged, and straight wound up anew?
No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne'er forgets:
May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.

Robert Browning
That far land we dream about,
Where every man is his own architect.

Robert Browning
One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, One more wrong to man, one more insult to God!

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
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life's business being just the terrible choice.

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

Robert Browning