Emma Lazarus Quotes

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

“The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford.”

“I seem to have always one little window looking but into life.”

“No man had ever heard a nightingale,
When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred
To study and define — what is a bird.”

“Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, —
The exiles by the streams of Babylon.”

“Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.”

“Then Nature shaped a poet's heart — a lyre
From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows
Drew trembling music.”

“Sweet empty sky of June without a stain,
Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills
Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain,
That each dark copse and hollow overfills:”

“The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
We know not which is sadder to recall.”

“No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead.”

“Lo — a black line of birds in wavering thread
Bore him the greetings of the deathless dead!”

“A lady 'twixt two knights' stone effigies,
And every day in dusky glory steeps
Their sculptured slumber of five centuries.”