Philip James Bailey Quotes

Nature means Necessity.

Mind and night will meet, though in silence, like forbidden lovers.

Sorrow is a stone that crushes a single bearer to the ground, while two are able to carry it with ease.

He who has most of heart knows most of sorrow.

Write to the mind and heart, and let the ear Glean after what it can.

Blest is he whose heart is the home of the great dead and their great thoughts.

My favoured temple is an humble heart.

Could I love less, I should be happier now.

I cannot be content with less than heaven; Living, and comprehensive of all life. Thee, universal heaven, celestial all; Thee, sacrjd seat of intellective time; Field of the soul 's best wisdom : home of truth , Star-throned.

Ah, nothing comes to us too soon but sorrow.

Evil is limited. One cannot form
A scheme for universal evil.

Youth might be wise; we suffer less from pains than pleasures.

The poet's pen is the true divining rod Which trembles towards the inner founts of feeling; Bringing to light and use, else hid from all, The many sweet clear sources which we have of good and beauty in our own deep bosoms; And marks the variations of all mind As does the needle.

Let each man think himself an act of God, His mind a thought, his life a breath of God; And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds, To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.

And these are joys, like beauty, but skin deep.

Kindness is wisdom.

Star canto: star speaks light, and world to world
Repeats the passage of the universe
To God; the name of Christ
the one great word
Well worth all languages in earth or heaven.

When night hath set her silver lamp high, Then is the time for study.

The death-change comes. Death is another life. We bow our heads At going out, we think, and enter straight Another golden chamber of the king's Larger than this we leave, and lovelier. And then in shadowy glimpses, disconnect, The story, flower-like, closes thus its leaves. The will of God is all in all. He makes, Destroys, remakes, for His own pleasure, all.

It is much less what we do than what we think, which fits us for the future.

Life is as serious a thing as death.

The worst way to improve the world is to condemn it.

The ground of all great thoughts is sadness.

If all were rich, gold would be penniless.

Respect is what we owe; love, what we give.

Where imperfection ceaseth, heaven begins.

The heart is its own Fate.

Men might be better if we better deemed of them.

Fine thoughts are wealth, for the right use of which
Men are and ought to be accountable,
If not to Thee, to those they influence.

Say gray-beards what they please,
The heart of age is like an emptied wine-cup;
Its life lies in a heel-tap: how can age judge?
'Twere a waste of time to ask how they wasted theirs;
But while the blood is bright, breath sweet, skin smooth,
And limbs all made to minister delight;
Ere yet we have shed our locks, like trees their leaves,
And we stand staring bare into the air;
He is a fool who is not for love and beauty.

Life is less than nothing without love.

Lowliness is the base of every virtue, And he who goes the lowest builds the safest.

It is no great misfortune to oblige ungrateful people, but an unsupportable one to be forced to be under an obligation to a scoundrel.

Poetry is itself a thing of God;
He made his prophets poets; and the more
We feel of poesie do we become
Like God in love and power,-under-makers.

Hell is more bearable than nothingness.

Obey thy genius, for a minister it is unto the throne of fate. Draw to thy soul, and centralize the rays which are around of the Divinity.

The long days are no happier than the short ones.

He is a fool who is not for love and beauty. I speak unto the young, for I am of them and always shall be.

I am tired of looking on what is,
One might as well see beauty never more,
As look upon it with an empty eye.
I would this world were over. I am tired.

Dreams are rudiments
Of the great state to come. We dream what is
About to happen.

The value of a thought cannot be told.

There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence.

None but God can fill the perfect whole.

A poet not in love is out at sea; He must have a lay-figure.

For ivy climbs the crumbling hall To decorate decay.

The dew, 'Tis of the tears which stars weep, sweet with joy.

The course of Nature seems a course of Death, And nothingness the whole substantial thing.

None but the brave and beautiful can love.

Death is the universal salt of states; Blood is the base of all things
law and war.

Stars which stand as thick as dewdrops on the field of heaven.

What are ye orbs? The words of God? the Scriptures of the skies?

True faith nor biddeth nor abideth form,
The bended knee, the eye uplift; is all
Which men need render; all which God can bear.
What to the faith are forms? A passing speck,
A crow upon the sky.

Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths.

O, there is naught on earth worth being known but God and our own souls!

Evil then results from imperfection.

We live not to ourselves, our work is life.

Man is one; and he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel, with a gigantic throb athwart the sea, each other's rights and wrongs; thus are we men.

It is fine to stand upon some lofty mountain thought, and feel the spirit stretch into a view.

Necessity, like electricity, is in ourselves and all things, and no more without us than within us.

Remember that thy heart will shed its pleasures as thine eye its tears, and both leave loathsome furrows.

Kindness is wisdom. There is none in life But needs it and may learn.

The temples perish, but the God still lives.

The hero is the world-man, in whose heart One passion stands for all, the most indulged.

The sun, centre and sire of light, The keystone of the world-built arch of heaven.

When I forget that the stars shine in air
When I forget that beauty is in stars
When I forget that love with beauty is
Will I forget thee: till then all things else.

When pride thaws, look for floods.

Hell is the wrath of God
His hate of sin.

The truth is perilous never to the true, Nor knowledge to the wise; and to the fool, And to the false, error and truth alike, Error is worse than ignorance.

Could we but think with the intensity we love with, we might do great things.

Naught but God Can satisfy the soul.

I run the gauntlet of a file of doubts,
Each one of which down hurls me to the ground.

Dewdrops, Nature's tears, which she Sheds in her own breast for the fair which die. The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor Nature loves to weep.

The wind breathes not, and the wave
Walks softly as above a grave.

Life hath more awe than death.

We must not pluck death from the Maker's hand.

The world is a great poem, and the world's
The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts.

Let us think less of men and more of God.

There is no disappointment we endure one-half so great as what we are to ourselves.

See the gold sunshine patching, And streaming and streaking across The gray-green oaks; and catching, By its soft brown beard, the moss.

The beautiful are never desolate; But some one alway loves them
God or man. If man abandons, God himself takes them.

Doubt is the shadow of truth.

The truth of truths is love.

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.

Lips like rosebuds peeping out of snow.

What men call accident is God's own part.

Love spends his all, and still hath store.

Grief hallows hearts, even while it ages heads.

Surely the stars are images of love.

Who can mistake great thoughts? They seize upon the mind; arrest and search, And shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind; Rush over it like a river reeds.

Not a single path
Of thought I tread, but that it leads to God.

Where doubt there truth is - 'tis her shadow.

As the master so the valet.

Burn to be great, Pay not thy praise to lofty things alone. The plains are everlasting as the hills, The bard cannot have two pursuits; aught else Comes on the mind with the like shock as though Two worlds had gone to war, and met in air.

Life's but a means unto an end, that end,
Beginning, mean, and end to all things
God.

Application is the price to be paid for mental acquisition. To have the harvest, we must sow the seed.

How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!

It is sad
To see the light of beauty wane away,
Know eyes are dimming, bosoms shrivelling, feet
Losing their springs, and limbs their lily roundness;
But it is worse to feel the heart-spring gone,
To lose hope, care not for the coming thing,
And feel all things go to decay within us.