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- Two men look out through the same bars:
One sees the mud, and one the stars.
Frederick Langbridge, Pessimist and Optimist
- It is sanctionable and right
Always to be ashamed of being sad.
Philip Larkin, "'Many famous feet have trod,'" 63-64
- Where's the sense
In saying love, but meaning interference?
Philip Larkin, "He Hears That His Beloved Has Become Engaged," 12-13
- Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Philip Larkin,"Toads," 1-2
- Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.
Philip Larkin, "Toads Revisited," 35-36
- superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Philip Larkin, "Church-Going," 34-35
- How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first
So that you come off worst?
Philip Larkin, "Love," 7-9
- Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse," 9-12
- I take you now and for always,
For always is always now.
Philip Larkin, "'Is it for now or for always?'" 11-12
- When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such lovely language.
D.H. Lawrence
- Our todays and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Builders
- Ye are better than all the ballads,
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are livingpoems,
And all the rest are dead.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Children
- There's nothing in the world so sweet as love,
And next to love the sweetest thing is hate.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spanish Student
- 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.
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, from A Psalm of Life (1839)
- All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.
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, Theologian's Talefrom Tales of a Wayside Inn
- Each morning sees some task begun
Each evening sees it close.
something attempted, something done,
has earned a night's repose.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress;
And as the evening twilight slips away,
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus
- Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Morituri Salutamus
- The sea is still and deep.
A single step, and all is o'er;
A plunge, a bubble, and no more.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus, The Golden Legend Pt. V
- The sea is silent, the sea is discreet,
Deep it lies at thy very feet.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus, The Golden Legend Pt. V
- Pride goeth forth on horseback grand and gay,
But cometh back on foot, and begs its way.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Bell of Atri
- Patience is a plant
That grows not in all gardens.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Michael Angelo, Part ii
- I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.
Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta. Going to the Wars
- Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage. . . .
Richard Lovelace, To Althea. From Prison
- Greatly shining,
The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky;
And the fish-ponds shake their backs and show their dragon scales
As she passes over them.
Amy Lowell, Wind and Silver
- Wondrous and awful are thy silent halls,
O kingdom of the past!
There lie the byegone ages in their palls,
Guarded by shadows vast.
James Russel Lowell, To the Past
- Preach to the storm, and reason with despair,
But tell not Misery's son that life is fair.
Bulwer Lytton, Lines on reading the preface to N. Bloomfield's poems
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