Richard Le Gallienne Quotes

Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the difference between them.

All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal.

There's too much beauty upon this earth
For lonely men to bear.

There is something mean in human nature that prefers to think evil, that gives a willing ear and a ready welcome to calumny, a sort of jealousy of goodness and greatness and things of good report.

She's somewhere in the sunlight strong, / Her tears are in the falling rain, / She calls me in the wind's soft song, / And with the flowers she comes again.

On the contrary, woman is the best equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle.

If Romeo and Juliet make a tragedy of it nowadays, they have only to blame their own mismanagement, for the world is with them as it has never been before, and all sensible fathers and mothers know it.

What long-dead face makes here the grass so green?
On what earth-buried bosom do we lean?
Ah! love, when we in turn are grass and flowers,
By what kind eyes to come shall we be seen?

The beauty we love is very silent. It smiles softly to itself, but never speaks.

Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to its lighter fancies.

I meant to do my work today but . . .

It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living.

Into this life of cruel wonder sent,
Without a word to tell us what it meant,
Sent back again without a reason why -
Birth, life, and death - 'twas all astonishment.

The soul is but senses catching fire,
Marvellous music of the body's lyre, -
The angel senses are the silver strings
Stirred by the breath of some unknown desire.

More and more the world is growing to love a lover, and one has only to read the newspapers to see how sympathetic are the times to any generous and adventurous display of the passions.

Good friends, beware! the only life we know
Flies from us like an arrow from the bow,
The caravan of life is moving by,
Quick! to your places in the passing show.

Races and nations are thus ever ready to believe the worst of one another.

We have, of course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal affairs of man.

Nature is forever arriving and forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her partings a promise of meetings farther along the road.

Happy is the man who loves the woods and waters,
Brother to the grass and well beloved of Pan;
The earth shall be his, and all her laughing daughters.
Happy the man.

Some say we came God's purpose to fulfil -
Faith a poor purpose then, if so you will;
Sport for the heavenly huntsmen, others say, -
Sorry the sport, methinks, and poor the skill.

The soul's a sort of sentimental wife,
That prays and whimpers of the higher life.

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.

WAKE! for the sun, the shepherd of the sky,
Has penned the stars within their fold on high,
And, shaking darkness from his mighty limbs,
Scatters the daylight from his burning eye.

I meant to do my work today
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree
And a butterfly flitted across the field
And all the leaves were calling me.

It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.

All wines are by their very nature full of reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.

A woman's beauty is one of her great missions.

Like to a maid who exquisitely turns
A promising face to him who, waiting, burns
In hell to hear her answer - so the world
Tricks all, and hints what no man ever learns.

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination.