Best Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.

It is a beautiful trait in the lovers character, that they think no evil of the object loved.

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

Some men must follow, and some command, though all are made of clay.

Let us, then, be up and doing, with a heart for any fate; still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.

No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

The Laws of Nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the Laws of Nature --were Man as unerring in his judgments as Nature.

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake somebody.

If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day. Their old familiar carols play. And wild and sweet the words repeat. Of peace on earth goodwill to men.

All things come round to him who will but wait.

Every man must patiently bide his time. He must wait -- not in listless idleness but in constant, steady, cheerful endeavors, always willing and fulfilling and accomplishing his task, that when the occasion comes he may be equal to the occasion.

It is foolish to pretend that one is fully recovered from a disappointed passion. Such wounds always leave a scar.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.

A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.

And the night shall be filled with music, and the cares, that infest the day, shall fold their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently steal away.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

Therefore trust to thy heart, and to what the world calls illusions.

Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime. And, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.

Fame comes only when deserved, and then is as inevitable as destiny, for it is destiny.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.

Know how sublime a thing it is to suffer and be strong.

One half the world must sweat and groan that the other half may dream.

Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.

Trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment. There is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows.

Into each life some rain must fall, some days be dark and dreary.

Sail on ship of state, sail on, I union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, is hanging on thy fate!

The greatest firmness is the greatest mercy.

Joy, temperance, and repose, slam the door on the doctor's nose.

Well has it been said that there is no grief like the grief which does not speak.

All the means of action -- the shapeless masses -- the materials -- lie everywhere about us. What we need is the celestial fire to change the flint into the transparent crystal, bright and clear. That fire is genius.

Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship Let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, who has sight so keen and strong That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroken; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

Whatever poet, orator, or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.

For age is opportunity no less than youth itself, though in another dress, and as the evening twilight fades away, the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.