Robert Browning: Quotes about God

Robert Browning was English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era. Explore interesting quotes on god.
Robert Browning: 358 quotes205 likes

“I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 5.
Paracelsus (1835)

“The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!”

Robert Browning Pippa Passes

Part I, line 221.
Pippa Passes (1841)

“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 Rabbi ben Ezra

Source: Dramatis Personae (1864), Rabbi Ben Ezra, Line 142.
Context: 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.

“But, brave,
Thou at first prompting of what I call God,
And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,
Accept the obligation laid on thee,
Mother elect, to save the unborn child,
As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,
Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant
And flower o' the field, all in a common pact
To worthily defend the trust of trusts,
Life from the Ever Living”

Robert Browning The Ring and the Book

Book X : The Pope.
The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
Context: What wonder if the novel claim had clashed
With old requirement, seemed to supersede
Too much the customary law? But, brave,
Thou at first prompting of what I call God,
And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,
Accept the obligation laid on thee,
Mother elect, to save the unborn child,
As brute and bird do, reptile and the fly,
Ay and, I nothing doubt, even tree, shrub, plant
And flower o' the field, all in a common pact
To worthily defend the trust of trusts,
Life from the Ever Living: — didst resist —
Anticipate the office that is mine —
And with his own sword stay the upraised arm,
The endeavour of the wicked, and defend
Him who, — again in my default, — was there
For visible providence: one less true than thou
To touch, i' the past, less practised in the right,
Approved less far in all docility
To all instruction, — how had such an one
Made scruple "Is this motion a decree?"

“Each a God's germ, but doomed remain a germ
In unexpanded infancy”

Robert Browning book Sordello

Book the Third
Sordello (1840)

“Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"”

Robert Browning Rabbi ben Ezra

Source: Dramatis Personae (1864), Rabbi Ben Ezra, Line 1.
Context: Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

“God is the perfect poet.”

Robert Browning

“If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.”

Robert Browning Men and Women

"Fra Lippo Lippi", line 217.
Men and Women (1855)
Source: The Poems of Robert Browning

“The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!”

Robert Browning Pippa Passes

Part I, line 221.
Source: Pippa Passes (1841)

“I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
I trust in God,—the right shall be the right
And other than the wrong, while he endures.
I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
The outward and the inward,—Nature's good
And God's.”

Robert Browning

A Soul's Tragedy (1846), Act. i.

“That we devote ourselves to God, is seen
In living just as though no God there were.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 1.
Paracelsus (1835)

“Other heights in other lives, God willing.”

Robert Browning

Stanza xii.
One Word More (1855)

“Better have failed in the high aim, as I,
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed,—
As, God be thanked! I do not.”

Robert Browning

The Inn Album, iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides,—one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her!”

Robert Browning

Stanza xvii.
One Word More (1855)

“Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?
But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men.”

Robert Browning Rabbi ben Ezra

Source: Dramatis Personae (1864), Rabbi Ben Ezra, Line 180.

“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

Instans Tyrannus, vii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“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 Men and Women

"De Gustibus", line 586.
Men and Women (1855)
Variant: 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.

“God made all the creatures, and gave them our love and our fear,
To give sign we and they are his children, one family here.”

Robert Browning

"Saul", vi.
Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845)

“I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive,—what time, what circuit first,
I ask not; but unless God send his hail
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
In some time, his good time, I shall arrive:
He guides me and the bird. In his good time.”

Robert Browning Paracelsus

Part 1.
Paracelsus (1835)