Browning Quotes

If thou must love me, let it be for naught except for love's sake only. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought. ~ Robert Browning

Being from Australia, I've never even touched a gun. It's so not a part of our culture. ~ Emily Browning

I know those kinds of lenses, said Tuppence. By the time you've adjusted the shutter and stopped down and calculated the exposure and kept your eye on the spirit level, your brain gives out and you yearn for the simple browning. ~ Agatha Christie

I have to just worry about my own opinion and the opinions of the people I'm working with and people who are close to me. ~ Emily Browning

Tis solace making baubles, ay, and sport.
Himself peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books
Careless and lofty, lord now of the isle:
Vexed, 'stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped,
Wrote thereon, he knows what, prodigious words;
Has peeled a wand and called it by a name;
Weareth at whiles for an enchanter's robe
The eyed skin of a supple oncelot;
And hath an ounce sleeker than youngling mole,
A four-legged serpent he makes cower and couch,
Now snarl, now hold its breath and mind his eye,
And saith she is Miranda and my wife:
'Keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane
He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge;
Also a sea-beast, lumpish, which he snared,
Blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame,
And split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge
In a hole o' the rock and calls him Caliban;
A bitter heart that bides its time and bites. ~ Robert Browning

You stupid, conceited fool! You know nothing! You're like a child, blind to everything but its own empty stomach! Well, grow up, Carl, and join the real world. Until you do, for God's sake leave me be! ~ Amanda Browning

Why stay on the earth except to grow. ~ Robert Browning

O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think, - 'Enough,
Enough of life in so much! - here's a cause
For rupture; - herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!'
- And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended. - Then, Life calls to us
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around .
Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
To own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life's voice! - still, we make our peace with Life. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] Her sweetness of character is even beyond her genius. ~ Mary Russell Mitford

Earth being so good, would heaven seem best? ~ Robert Browning

Since when was genius found respectable? ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

This could but have happened once,- And we missed it, lost it forever. ~ Robert Browning

Sorrow, the heart must bear,
Sits in the home of each, conspicuous there.
Many a circumstance, at least,
Touches the very breast.
For those
Whom any sent away,
he knows:
And in the live man's stead,
Armor and ashes reach
The house of each. ~ Robert Browning

The flower-girl's prayer to buy roses and pinks, held out in the smoke, like stars by day. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe, all were for me, in the kiss of one girl. ~ Robert Browning

The common problem, yours, mine, everyone's Is ? not to fancy what were fair in life Provided it could be ? but, finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair Up to our means. ~ Robert Browning

Let friend trust friends, and love demand love's like. ~ Robert Browning

Talent should minister to genius. ~ Robert Browning

I can cry at the drop of a hat. I've always found that easier than laughing in films. ~ Emily Browning

Youth means love, Vows can't change nature, priests are only men. ~ Robert Browning

Can we kick some vampire ass already? ~ Taryn Browning

I've been acting since I was a kid, so I just feel confident in the fact that I can do it to some degree. I've never thought I was amazing; I've just thought, 'I know this, I can do it.' ~ Emily Browning

That great brow And the spirit-small hand propping it. ~ Robert Browning

Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. ~ Robert Browning

I say, the acknowledgment of God in ChristAccepted by thy reason, solves for theeAll questions in the earth and out of it,And has so far advanced thee to be wise. ~ Robert Browning

It kind of sucked when she had to take a break from fighting evil to use her inhaler. ~ Taryn Browning

O Earth, so full of dreary noises!
O men, with wailing in your voices!
O delved gold, the wader's heap!
O strife, O curse, that o'er it fall!
God makes a silence through you all,
And giveth His beloved, sleep. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was of us, Burns, Shelley, were with us. They watch from their graves! ~ Robert Browning

Less is more. -Robert Browning ~ Louisa Thomsen Brits

The soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak,
And placed it by thee on a golden throne,
And that I love (O soul, we must be meek!)
Is by thee only, whom I love alone. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. ~ Robert Browning

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Who needed Prozac when a girl could get Pillsbury without a prescription?" ~Allie Shelby, Personal Assets ~ Kelsey Browning

Italy/Is one thing, England one. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love me ... -toll
The silver iterance! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Every morning, when I'm really, really tired ... when I'm dead tired is when I feel most alive. ~ Logan Browning

An ignorance of means may minister to greatness, but an ignorance of aims make it impossible to be great at all. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And friends, dear friends,
when it shall be That this low breath is gone from me, And gone my bier ye come to weep, Let One, most loving of you all, Say, Not a tear must o'er her fall; He giveth His beloved sleep. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

---all's love, yet all's law. ~ Robert Browning

Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, - been happy. ~ Robert Browning

Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound. ~ Christian Wiman

Books, books, books! I had found the secret of a garret room Piled high with cases in my father's name; Piled high, packed large,
where, creeping in and out Among the giant fossils of my past, Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs Of a mastodon, I nibbled here and there At this or that box, pulling through the gap, In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy, The first book first. And how I felt it beat Under my pillow, in the morning's dark, An hour before the sun would let me read! My books! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The picture of helpless indolence she calls herself
sublimely helpless and impotent
I had done living I thought
Was ever life so like death before? My face was so close against the tombstones,
that there seemed no room for tears. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Night conceals a world but reveals a universe. ~ Robert Browning

Art is much, but love is more ... ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When the dust of death has choked a great man's voice, the common words he said turn oracles, the common thoughts he yoked like horses draw like griffins. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Yet how proud we are,
In daring to look down upon ourselves! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Love doesn't make the world go round, Love is what makes the ride worthwhile! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls. ~ Robert Browning

Children use the fist until they are of age to use the brain. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Maybe it's true that an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. But you'd go mad reading all of their rough drafts, ~ James Browning

Death forerunneth Love to win "Sweetest eyes were ever seen." ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing dumb ever starts out stupid. ~ Kurt Browning

Whoever lives true life, will love true love. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Oh the wild joys of living! The leaping from rock to rock ... the cool silver shock of the plunge in a pool's living waters. ~ Robert Browning

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with. ~ Robert Browning

To say I woke up one day and reached a point where I no longer cared about the pains to befall me would be a lie. Nor can I say that I have ever fully forgiven those who willfully did me harm. On a deep, internal battlefield, I wrestle with the thought that I have been robbed of any chance of normalcy by the losses suffered. Therapists and gurus alike tell us to, "Let go or be dragged," as Zen proverb urges - to forgive for our own sake. But, in my experience, there is no letting go and forgiveness is transient. My inability to be free of it all isn't for lack of an evolved consciousness on my part. I've "done the work" to process it all; rather, it is my irreconcilable, inescapable humanity that causes to clutch the pain close to me. ~ L.M. Browning

Is your love for the Lord sufficient to give all your time and talents to his work? ~ Robert Browning

I know a lot of parents of kid actors I've worked with have pressured them into acting, but my parents are different. I'm really lucky to have them because they let me make my own decisions. ~ Emily Browning

There are nettles everywhere, but smooth, green grasses are more common still; the blue of heaven is larger than the cloud. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Have you found your life distasteful?
My life did and does smack sweet.
Was your youth of pleasure wasteful?
Mine I save and hold complete.
Do your joys with age diminish?
When mine fail me, I'll complain.
Must in death your daylight finish?
My sun sets to rise again. ~ Robert Browning

Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything. ~ Robert Browning

Good aims not always make good books. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her- Next time, herself!-not the trouble behind her ~ Robert Browning

The peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head. ~ Robert Browning

There are those who believe something, and therefore will tolerate nothing; and on the other hand, those who tolerate everything, because they believe nothing. ~ Robert Browning

The FN P-35 was known more commonly as the Browning Hi-Power, a popular enough firearm to those who used it, and in and of itself, nothing more needed to be noted. Except the fact that the Browning was the sidearm of choice for the Special Air Service, and while the gun itself was produced by Fabrique Nationale, a Belgian concern, and named after an American gunmaker--John M. Browning--there were many who thought of the weapon as Very British Indeed. ~ Greg Rucka

Lady Gough's Book of Etiquette, published in 1863, established some of the social commandments of the times: one must avoid, for example, the intolerable proximity of male and female authors on library shelves. Books could only stand together if the authors were married, such as in the case of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. ~ Eduardo Galeano

His ears were often the first thing to catch my tears. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Most progress is most failure. ~ Robert Browning

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 poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world." But it also contains this disconcerting passage:
Then owls and bats
Cowls and twats
Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!
Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat
which meant precisely the same then as it does now
but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him. ~ Bill Bryson

Light tomorrow with today. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

When members of the London Poetry Society asked Browning to interpret a particularly difficult passage of Sordello, he read it twice, frowned, then admitted, "When I wrote that, God and I knew what I meant, but now God alone knows."
Rather than risk sounding dense, readers, colleagues, and critics who can't figure out what a writer is trying to say but think it sounds intelligent will typically resort to calling such work "daring," "provocative," or "complex." An unholy alliance of writers and readers is at work here. ~ Ralph Keyes

We get no good by being ungenerous, even to a book, and calculating profits ... so much help by so much reading. it is rather when we gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound, impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth
'tis then we get the right good from the book. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The body sprang At once to the height, and stayed; but the soul,-no! ~ Robert Browning

Shut up!" He bellowed again, clearly very confused.

"Why do people say 'shut up'? Shut what… My hand? My mouth? If you mean mouth than why did you add the 'up'? You can't shut your mouth down so it's redundant. If you had just said 'Shut' I would have shut my mouth just the same. Actually, I probably wouldn't have, but that's beside the point. See, the proper way to say it would be…"

"Would you… be quiet?!" Hom yelled. ~ Kaycee Browning

God's justice, tardy though it prove perchance, Rests never on the track until it reach Delinquency. ~ Robert Browning

Souls are gregarious in a sense, but no soul touches another, as a general rule. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There are so many actors that I've worked with that I'd like to work with again and there are so many girls. So often when you're up for a role, you're the only girl, and people think that a positive thing: "You get to be the only girl here!" That's not an exciting kind of idea to me. ~ Emily Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher? ~ Dorothy Fields

But God has a few of us to whom he whispers in the ear; The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musicians know. ~ Robert Browning

Was there nought better than to enjoy? No feat which, done, would make time break, And let us pent-up creatures through Into eternity, our due? No forcing earth teach heaven's employ? ~ Robert Browning

Rognons de Veau à la Bordelaise is simplicity itself to make; no different, essentially, from Poulet Sauté, and no different, especially, from Bifteck Sauté Bercy. In fact, making it that night felt like falling into a time warp- I stood before the stove, melting butter and browning meat and smelling the smells of wine deglazing and shallots softening- but the dishes changed before my eyes, and I heard Julia warbling, "Boeuf Bourguignon is the same as Coq au Vin. You can use lamb, you can use veal, you can use pork.... ~ Julie Powell

During the worst of it, onlookers who have learned my story often comment to me that, "All the hardships you suffered were part of a divine plan for your life because something good came from each bad thing." As though a divine presence decided to teach me these great lessons through pain. I am affronted by such a suggestion because it robs me of my accomplishment by removing the element of transcendence.
I don't believe we learn anything from suffering. If human beings inherently learned through suffering, we would be a population of enlightened beings and we're not. We learn from suffering if and only if we manage to transcend our suffering to find meaning in what is otherwise senseless. This process of transcendence is a profoundly human one that imparts the deepest - most lasting - sense of achievement. ~ L.M. Browning

The Holy Night We sate among the stalls at Bethlehem; The dumb kine from their fodder turning them, Softened their horned faces To almost human gazes Toward the newly Born: The simple shepherds from the star-lit brooks Brought visionary looks, As yet in their astonied hearing rung The strange sweet angel-tongue: The magi of the East, in sandals worn, Knelt reverent, sweeping round, With long pale beards, their gifts upon the ground, The incense, myrrh, and gold These baby hands were impotent to hold: So let all earthlies and celestials wait Upon thy royal state. Sleep, sleep, my kingly One! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Never work for a company that says people are its most important asset. If you wanted to get a mortgage and you said that your only asset was people you would end up living in a tent. ~ Guy Browning

Say not "a small event!" Why "small"? Costs it more pain that this ye call A "great event" should come to pass From that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed! ~ Robert Browning

Tis looking downward makes one dizzy. ~ Robert Browning

Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold. ~ Robert Browning

Truth never hurt the teller. ~ Robert Browning

Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:
Would she have lost the poet's fire for the anguish of the burning?
The minstrel harp, for the strained string? tripod for the afflated
Woe, or the vision, for those tears in which it shone dilated? ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Mid the sharp, short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well,
The wild tulip at the end of its tube, blows out its great red bell,
Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell. ~ Robert Browning

Character halts without aid of the imagination, which our classes in Shakespeare and Browning, music and drawing, recognize not only as amusement and by-play of the mind, but a co-ordinate power. Its work is unhappily styled fiction; for to idealize is to realize. ~ C. A. Bartol

Truth is truth howe'er it strike. ~ Robert Browning

Why do I get the feeling that to say "fancy meeting you here" would hardly be apt? Sharks can smell blood from miles away, I hear. ~ Amanda Browning