Alfred Austin Quotes (56 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Alfred Austin: 56 quotes1 like

Famous Alfred Austin Quotes

“Friendship, 'tis said, is love without his wings,
And friendship, sir, is sweet enough for me.”

Source: Savonarola (1881), Candida to Valori in Act I, sc. ii; p. 35.

“So long as faith with freedom reigns
And loyal hope survives,
And gracious charity remains
To leaven lowly lives;
While there is one untrodden tract
For intellect or will,
And men are free to think and act,
Life is worth living still.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Poetry Quotes, Is Life Worth Living? http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/9/3/1/19316/19316.htm (1896)

“Show me your garden, provided
it be your own, and I will tell you what you are
like.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden that I Love (1905)

“Is life worth living? Yes, so long
As Spring revives the year,
And hails us with the cuckoo's song,
To show that she is here;”

Alfred Austin

Source: Is Life Worth Living? http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/9/3/1/19316/19316.htm (1896)

“He is dead already who doth not feel
Life is worth living still.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Is Life Worth Living? http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/9/3/1/19316/19316.htm (1896)

“Is life worth living? Yes, so long
As there is wrong to right,
Wail of the weak against the strong,
Or tyranny to fight;”

Alfred Austin

Is Life Worth Living? http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/9/3/1/19316/19316.htm (1896)

Alfred Austin Quotes about nature

“The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.”

Alfred Austin

Source: As quoted in Growing with the Seasons (2008) by Frank & Vicky Giannangelo, p. 115., and one or two other gardening books, as well as on various internet gardening sites and lists of quotations. However, it is sometimes attributed to Voltaire, and about one-third of the time it is quoted without attribution (at times even without quotation marks). It is not to be found in Austin's The Garden That I Love or any of its five sequels.

“Once learn how Nature gardens for herself, and you will be able to spare yourself a good deal of trouble.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 22.

“If Nature built by rule and square,
Than man what wiser would she be?
What wins us is her careless care,
And sweet unpunctuality.”

Alfred Austin

Source: "Nature and the Book", stanza XVII; p. 68, At the Gate of the Convent (1885)

“Doth Nature draw me, 'tis because,
Unto my seeming, there doth lurk
A lawlessness about her laws,
More mood than purpose in her work.”

Alfred Austin

Source: "Nature and the Book", stanza XV; p. 67, At the Gate of the Convent (1885)

“Know, Nature, like the cuckoo, laughs at law,
Placing her eggs in whatso nest she will.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Lorenzo de' Medici in Act I, sc. i; p. 14.

“Imagination should
A reconciler, not a rebel, be,
To teach the heart of man to apprehend
Nature's vicissitudes, and bear his own,
With sympathetic fancy.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Urania in Act IV, sc. ii; p. 178.

Alfred Austin: Trending quotes

“O'er the wires the electric message came,
"He is no better; he is much the same."”

Alfred Austin

On the Illness of the Prince of Wales (1910)

An 1871 poem on the illness of the Prince of Wales, although there is some doubt that Austin actually wrote this part. That classic compendium "The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse" (2d ed. 1930; Capricorn paperback 1962) includes a dozen quotations from Austin but attributes this particular couplet (p. 17) to a "university poet unknown." It also provides a metrically more accurate first line, "Across the wires the gloomy message came," plus "not" for "no" in the second line.
On the Illness of the Prince of Wales (1910)

“No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.”

Alfred Austin

Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)

“Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.”

Alfred Austin

Prose Papers on Poetry Macmillan & Co 1910.
Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)

Alfred Austin Quotes

“[…] faded smiles oft linger in the face,
While grief's first flakes fall silent on the head!”

Alfred Austin

Source: "Unseasonable Snows", line 13; p. 38, Lyrical Poems (1891)

“So, timely you came, and well you chose,
You came when most needed, my winter rose.
From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press
Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.”

Alfred Austin

Source: "My Winter Rose", stanza VII; p. 23., Lyrical Poems (1891)

“In vain would science scan and trace
Firmly her aspect. All the while,
There gleams upon her far-off face
A vague unfathomable smile.”

Alfred Austin

Source: "Nature and the Book", Stanza XX; p. 69, At the Gate of the Convent (1885)

“My virgin sense of sound was steeped
In the music of young streams;
And roses through the casement peeped,
And scented all my dreams.”

Alfred Austin

"Prelude", stanza XI; p. ix., At the Gate of the Convent (1885)

“[…] there is no love,
That merits such high christening, but is built
Firm upon some foundation out of sight;
God, country, virtue, something not ourself,
To which ourself is nothing, save the proof
Of its invisible sureness.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Candida to Valori in Act IV, sc. iv; p. 262, Savonarola (1881)

“Goodnight! Now dwindle wan and low
The embers of the afterglow,
And slowly over leaf and lawn
Is twilight's dewy curtain drawn.”

Alfred Austin

Source: "Goodnight!", in Lamia's Winter-Quarters (London: Macmillan and Co., 1898), p. 163.

“Who loves his country never forfeits heaven.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Candida to Valori in Act IV, sc. vi; p. 285.

“Never fear to weep;
For tears are summer showers to the soul,
To keep it fresh and green.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Candida to Valori in Act IV, sc. iv; p. 264.

“Your logic may be good,
But dialectics never saved a soul.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Frà Domenico in Act II, sc. ix; p. 197.

“Death is the looking-glass of life wherein
Each man may scan the aspect of his deeds.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Girolamo Savonarola in Act I, sc. iv; p. 49.

“Friendship craves
The commerce of the mind, not the exchange
Of emulous feasts that foster sycophants.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Lorenzo de' Medici in Act I, sc. i; pp. 6–7.

“Let your house
be spacious more than splendid, and be books
And busts your most conspicuous furniture.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Savonarola (1881), Lorenzo de' Medici in Act I, sc. i; p. 6.

“Why should you,
Because the world is foolish, not be wise?”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Franklin in Act II, sc. iv; p. 109.

“There is no office in this needful world
But dignifies the doer if done well.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Franklin in Act I, sc. iv; p. 65.

“The Devil is an echo
Of search unsatisfied.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Fortunatus in Act I, sc. iii; p. 35.

“Towns can be trusted to corrupt themselves.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Abaddon in Act I, sc. iii; p. 22.

“'Tis a world
Where all is bought, and nothing's worth the price.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Fortunatus in Act I, sc. ii; p. 17.

“Of all our feigned affections, there is none
So hollow, selfish, and injurious,
As what we christen Patriotism.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Fortunatus the Pessimist (1892), Fortunatus in Act I, sc. ii; p. 15.

“Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Soliloquies in Song (1882), "A Woman's Apology", stanza XI; p. 26

“Who once believed will never wholly doubt.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Prince Lucifer (1887), Lucifer in Act VI, sc. ii; p. 193.

“Who once has doubted never quite believes.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Prince Lucifer (1887), Eve in Act VI, sc. ii; p. 193.

“Death is master of lord and clown.
Close the coffin and hammer it down.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Prince Lucifer (1887), Adam in Act IV, sc. iv; p. 111.

“Let Will but set its appetite on war,
And Reason will promptly invent offence,
And furnish blood with arguments.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Prince Lucifer (1887), Abdiel in Act III, sc. iii; p. 80.

“Love and naughtiness are always in their teens.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Prince Lucifer (1887), Crone in Act III, sc. i; p. 63.

“[E]xclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 117.

“[T]here is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to admit that you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 13.

“Public opinion is no more than this,
What people think that other people think.”

Alfred Austin

Prince Lucifer (1887), Lucifer in Act VI, sc. ii; p. 189.

“A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography. Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 112.

“No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 112.

“Why from the plain truth should I shrink?
In woods men feel; in towns they think.
Yet, which is best? Thought, stumbling, plods
Past fallen temples, vanished gods,
Altars unincensed, fanes undecked,
Eternal systems flown or wrecked;
Through trackless centuries that grant
To the poor trudge refreshment scant,
Age after age, pants on to find
A melting mirage of the mind.
But feeling never wanders far,
Content to fare with things that are.”

Alfred Austin

Source: At the Gate of the Convent (1885), "A Defence of English Spring", p. 58.

“The most generous of critics, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry. But on a very thin thread of meaning poetry, or a very fair imitation of it, may be hung by the aid of musical sound.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Bridling of Pegasus (1910), "The Essentials of Great Poetry", p. 7.

“[P]eople who canalise their lives and prearrange their enjoyments lose much of the enchantment which attends the guiding beneficence of chance.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), p. 96.

“It is always delightful to have one's feelings expressed by some one else in language of enthusiasm one might oneself be afraid to employ.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), p. 68.

“Men preach Philosophy, women practise it.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), Lamia on p. 66.

“One must be intoxicated by scenery, in order to appreciate it. Tranquil survey is not enough, and scrutinising curiosity is fatal.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), p. 6.

“If you are not something of a philosopher,—and by philosophy I understand a serene temper, and the maintaining of an equable mind under the sharpest disappointments,—I do not advise you to cultivate, or at any rate to grow enamoured of, a garden.”

Alfred Austin

Source: In Veronica's Garden (1895), p. 92.

“Doth logic in the lily hide,
And where's the reason in the rose?”

Alfred Austin

The Door of Humility (1906)
Source: "Rome", XLI, line 11; p. 116.

“If Man makes Conscience, then being good
Is only being worldly wise,
And universal brotherhood
A comfortable compromise.”

Alfred Austin

The Door of Humility (1906)
Source: "Italy", XXXII, line 21; p. 82.

“Where in the lily lurks the mind,
Where in the rose discern the soul?More mindless still, stream, pasture, lake;
The mountains yet more heartless seem. […]It is their silence that appals,
Their aspect motionless that awes,
When searching spirit vainly calls
On the effect to bare the Cause.”

Alfred Austin

The Door of Humility (1906)
Source: "Switzerland", XXII, lines 15–18, 37–40; pp. 53–54.

“A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing, but it is not dangerous to the imagination. Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame. A little feeds it; a great deal extinguishes it.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Poet's Diary (1904), p. 158.

“People living and dead, things past and present, all are contributories to that diminutive stream, oneself; a reflection which is essentially consoling, since it associates one with the sum of things and prevents one from living in barren isolation.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love: Second Series (1907), p. 4.

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