Quotes from Longfellow

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

Resistance by its very nature demands that we choose choices not offered to us.

Our ingress into the world was naked and bare; our progress through the world is trouble and care; our egress from the world will be nobody knows where; but if we do well here we shall do well there.

Existem três Silêncios: o primeiro, de palavra; O segundo, de desejo; o terceiro, de pensamento.

The song and the silence in the heart, That in part are prophecies, and in part Are longings wild and vain

Be still sad heart and cease repining; Behind the clouds the sun is shining, Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life a little rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.

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

How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of the night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible. From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half sound, a half whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of the earth and all created things in the great miracle of nature?decay and reproduction?ever beginning, never ending?the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time.

Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as the blazing meteor when it descends to earth is only a stone.

O how wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul. The intellect of man sits enshrined visibly upon his forehead and in his eye; and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only, as God revealed himself to the prophet in the still small voice, and in a voice from the Burning Bush. The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain invisible to man.

Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death....

The every-day cares and duties which men call drudgery are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of Time, giving its pendulum a true vibration, and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon the wheels, the pendulum no longer sways, the hands no longer move, the clock stands still.

The rays of happiness, like those of light, are colourless when unbroken.

The shadows of the mind are like those of the body. In the morning of life they all lie behind us, at noon we trample them under foot, and in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us.

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.