Stephen Vincent Benét Quotes 67 Sourced Quotes
Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost Minute by minute, day by dragging day, In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways, The smooth appeasing compromises of time, Which are King Herod and King Herod's men, Always and always. Life can be Lost without vision but not lost by death, Lost by not caring, willing, going on Beyond the ragged edge of fortitude To something more — something no man has ever seen. You who love money, you who love yourself, You who love bitterness, and I who loved and lost and thought I could not love again, And all the people of this little town, Rise up! The loves we had were not enough. Something is loosed to change the shaken world, And with it we must change! Stephen Vincent Benét
She is all peace, all quiet, All passionate desires, the eloquent thunder Of new, glad suns, shouting aloud for joy, Over fresh worlds and clean, trampling the air Like stooping hawks, to the long wind of horns, Flung from the bastions of Eternity... And she is the low lake, drowsy and gentle, And good words spoken from the tongues of friends, And calmness in the evening, and deep thoughts, Falling like dreams from the stars' solemn mouths. All these. Stephen Vincent Benét
It is not given me to trace The lovely laughter of that face, Like a clear brook most full of light, Or olives swaying on a height, So silver they have wings, almost; Like a great word once known and lost And meaning all things. Nor her voice A happy sound where larks rejoice, Her body, that great loveliness, The tender fashion of her dress, I may not paint them. These I see, Blazing through all eternity, A fire-winged sign, a glorious tree! Stephen Vincent Benét
He brings man's freedom in his hands, Not as a coin that may be spent or lost But as a living fire within the heart, Never quite quenched — because he brings to all, The thought, the wish, the dream of brotherhood, Never and never to be wholly lost, The water and the bread of the oppressed, The stay and succor of the resolute, The harness of the valiant and the brave, The new word that has changed the shaken world. And, though he die, his word shall grow like wheat And every time a child is born, In pain and love and freedom hardly won, Born and gone forth to help and aid mankind, There will be women with a right to say "Gloria, gloria in excelsis deo! A child is born!" Stephen Vincent Benét
When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? Am I not spoken of, still, in every church in New England? 'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself — and of the best descent — for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours. Stephen Vincent Benét