“Each a God's germ, but doomed remain a germ
In unexpanded infancy”
Book the Third
Sordello (1840)
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Robert Browning 179
English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era 1812–1889Related quotes

“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.”
Source: Under the Greenwood Tree

Oscar Wilde, 1897, | Hart-Davis, ed., Letters of Wilde, p. 173 https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/19170/UBC_1974_A8%20S88.pdf

“If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”
Source: The Children of Men (1992), Chapter 1.

Australian Meeting of the British Association. Inaugural Address. August 20th, 1914.

“Fate, and the dooming gods, are deaf to tears.”
Aeneis, Book VI, line 512.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 114-115
Context: The theologians who took up the work which the first reformers had laid down soon came to consider intolerance as a main evidence of spiritual life: erelong they were using all their powers in crushing every germ of new thought. Their theory was simply that the world had now reached its climax; that the religion of Luther was the final word of God to man; that everything depended upon keeping it absolutely pure; that men might comment upon it in hundreds of pulpits and lecture rooms and in thousands of volumes;—but change it in the slightest particle—never. And in order that it might never be changed it was petrified into rituals and creeds and catechisms and statements, and, above all, in 1579, into the "Formula of Concord," which, as more than one thoughtful man has since declared, turned out to be a "formula of discord."

“Now if thou be a bondslave vile become,
No wrong is that, but God's most righteous doom.”
Or se tu se' vil serva, e il tuo servaggio
(Non ti lagnar) giustizia, e non oltraggio.
Canto I, stanza 51 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)