Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Quotes about life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on life.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 404 quotes24 likes

“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Table-Talk (1857)
Source: The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“She knew the life-long martyrdom,
The weariness, the endless pain
Of waiting for some one to come
Who nevermore would come again.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Vittoria Colonna

Vittoria Colonna.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Ballads and Other Poems

Source: Ballads and Other Poems

“The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, — the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Table-Talk (1857)

“There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion
that if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble
Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret,
Spilled on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Tales of a Wayside Inn

Pt. III, The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth, sec. IV.
Source: Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874)

“The scholar and the world! The endless strife,
The discord in the harmonies of life!
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books;
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

St. 23. <br class="br"> Morituri Salutamus http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/19229 (1875)

“Footprints, that perhaps another,
Travelling o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life

St. 8.
A Psalm of Life (1839)

“There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Resignation

Resignation, st. 5.

“When we reflect that all the aspects of Nature, all the emotions of the soul, and all the events of life, have been the subjects of poetry for hundreds and thousands of years, we can hardly wonder that there should be so many resemblances and coincidences of expression among poets, but rather that they are not more numerous and more striking.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Table-Talk (1857)

“Thy fate is the common fate of all;
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Rainy Day

"The Rainy Day", Bentley's Miscellany ( December 1841 http://books.google.com/books?id=pW8AAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Thy+fate+is+the+common+fate+of+all+Into+each+life+some+rain+must+fall+some+days+must+be+dark+and+dreary%22&pg=PA626#v=onepage).

“Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life

St. 2.
A Psalm of Life (1839)

“Sail forth into the sea of life,
O gentle, loving, trusting wife,
And safe from all adversity
Upon the bosom of that sea
Thy comings and thy goings be!
For gentleness and love and trust
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust;
And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Building of the Ship

Source: The Building of the Ship (1849), Line 368.

“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life

St. 1.
A Psalm of Life (1839)

“O thou child of many prayers!
Life hath quicksands; life hath snares!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Maidenhood http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/12212, st. 9 (1842).

“And see! she stirs!
She starts,—she moves,—she seems to feel
The thrill of life along her keel,
And, spurning with her foot the ground,
With one exulting, joyous bound,
She leaps into the ocean's arms!”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Building of the Ship

Source: The Building of the Ship (1849), Lines 349-354.

“Chorus of the Eumenides: …
Never by lapse of time
The soul defaced by crime
Into its former self returns again;
For every guilty deed
Holds in itself the seed
Of retribution and undying pain.

Never shall be the loss
Restored, till Helios
Hath purified them with his heavenly fires;
Then what was lost is won,
And the new life begun,
Kindled with nobler passions and desires.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875)

“Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book Hyperion

Hyperion, book iv. Chap. viii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow A Psalm of Life

For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
St. 1.
A Psalm of Life (1839)